Oracle profit slides 24% as customers move to the cloud

Oracle has reported a sharp drop in profit for the quarter just ended, with customers spending more on its cloud services but less on software that runs in their own data centers.

Chairman Larry Ellison portrayed the shift as a positive one and said Oracle can make more money selling cloud services over the long term. But the change didn’t seem to help it much last quarter, when its results were also battered by the strong U.S. dollar.