The next generation of Oracle’s market-leading cloud database is soaring in the business world and it’s leading to impressive financial results, according to Rob Preston in Forbes BrandVoice on Sept. 21. Preston, the previous editor-in-chief of InformationWeek, outlines the new database’s key features and the numbers behind the financial results.

So, what makes the Oracle database “soar”? What makes it exceptional? It’s the first fully autonomous database cloud service. Preston quotes Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison who said the new version, “will not require human beings either to manage the database or tune the database.”

Here’s a list of Preston’s top five advantages to a fully autonomous database:

1.The 99.995 percent system availability of the new cloud database translates to less than 30 minutes of planned or unplanned downtime.
2.The database automatically tunes, patches and upgrades itself while the system is running.
3.The autonomy of the database eliminates labor costs.
4.The autonomy of the database eliminates human error.
5.The Oracle database will save customers who move there from Amazon Web Services’ Redshift database at least 50 percent.

Pretty impressive.

For the revenue numbers behind the financial results, Preston offers the following:

• Oracle’s total revenue in the quarter rose seven percent from the year-earlier quarter and net income increased 21 percent during that same period.
• Oracle’s cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenue rose 62 percent in the quarter. The SaaS business growth that quarter is more than twice as fast as Salesforce.com’s growth.
• Oracle’s combined platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service businesses rose 28 percent in the quarter.

These numbers reflect a growing and impressive customer base. Preston names Advance Auto Parts, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Honda Motor, GlaxoSmithKline, Liberty Mutual Insurance, the state of Nebraska and many others as new customers to either Oracle’s new enterprise resource planning services or Oracle Fusion human capital management services.

Oracle leadership expects to attain an 80 percent (non-GAAP) gross margin across its cloud businesses. By meeting this goal, Oracle will rise to a stock market capitalization that’s twice those of legacy competitors IBM and SAP. Ellison calls that a “stretch target.” Recent gross profit numbers—SaaS gross profit margins expanded to 65 percent in the latest fiscal quarter, from 57 percent a year ago—make it appear within reach.

“It will take several years to achieve (Oracle’s business growth goals),” said Ellison, “but we think we are well on our way.”

Read the original Forbes BrandVoice article .