During its second quarter, Oracle continued its assault on the cloud world, although it has a long way to go to catch Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The company announced today that for the quarter ended Nov. 30, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) revenues were up 81 percent year-over-year to $878 million.

The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) play that Cisco is so proud of is still small: $175 million in the second quarter, up 9 percent year-over-year. By contrast, AWS reported revenues of $3.2 billion in its most recent quarter.

But IaaS is still new, CEO Safra Catz reminded investors during a conference call today. In fact, Oracle expects IaaS gross margins to suffer for a while as the company continues to pour money into the growing business. This fall, Oracle made big promises to outdo AWS in terms of performance and price.

Overall cloud revenues were $1.1 billion for the quarter, the first time breaking the $1 billion mark for Oracle.

Cloud has been Oracle's bragging point in recent years. That's partly because the company's business is moving to the cloud, as evidenced by its growth in SaaS.

Oracle is particularly proud that IDC now ranks the company No. 1 in enterprise SaaS sales, passing longtime rival Salesforce.com. "We can beat them to the $10 billion mark, but it's going to be close," CTO Larry Ellison said on the call.

The $9.3 billion acquisition of NetSuite, completed in November, will boost cloud revenues further. In the third quarter, Oracle expects its SaaS and PaaS revenues to grow 82 to 86 percent.

Running the Numbers

Overall, Oracle's second quarter revenues were flat: $9.04 billion, compared with $8.99 billion in the same quarter a year ago.

Net income was $2.03 billion, or 48 cents per share, compared with $2.2 billion, or 51 cents per share, a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings per share of 61 cents beat the consensus estimate of 60 cents, according to Thomson Financial.

Oracle's most surprising news of the day was elsewhere. Catz was named to Donald Trump's presidential transition team. Catz was among the technology executives invited to a meeting with Trump — and his kids — in New York this week.

Photo: @oracleopenworld on Twitter.