Analysts said the slow global economy hurt Oracle, which saw its hardware sales fall and its new license revenue rise just a fraction as much as in the preceding quarter. They also say the company is spending to catch up in cloud computing, in which users get their software apps as needed via the Internet, or "cloud.

The business software giant said earnings per share minus items rose 2% for the quarter ended Nov. 30, compared with the year-earlier quarter. Revenue rose 2% to $8.8 billion. That's down from 12% year-over-year growth in the previous quarter.

The consensus estimate of 38 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters called for 57 cents a share and sales of $9.2 billion. It's the first time Oracle missed on profit since early 2008.

"There is a lot of uncertainty, not necessarily in the U.S., but what is happening in Europe," said UBS analyst Brent Thill.

Trip Chowdhry, an analyst for Global Equities Research, said Oracle's miss clearly is tied to the uncertain global economy.

"(It's) more a reflection of macro conditions than company-specific," he said via email.

But Karl Keirstead, an analyst for BMO Capital Markets, says Oracle has yet to get much mileage out of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Oracle bought server maker Sun in January 2010 for $7.4 billion.

"The issue that has dogged the stock for each of the last two or three earnings calls has been the Sun hardware business," he said. "Server unit sales have been declining. There is a general perception that Sun at best is only likely to maintain share relative to the other major server manufacturers like IBM (NYSE:IBM - News), HP (Hewlett-Packard) (NYSE:HPQ - News) and Dell (NASDAQ:DELL - News) .

Oracle said its Q2 hardware systems revenue fell 10% to $1.57 billion.

Total software revenue in the quarter rose 6% to $6 billion. New software licenses rose 2% to $2 billion. That's down from 17% growth the previous quarter.

For the current quarter, Oracle expects EPS minus items of 55 cents to 58 cents. Analysts were expecting 58 cents. It sees sales rising 1% to 5%, where analysts were expecting an 8% increase to $9.45 billion.

"The quarter was not as we thought it should be," Safra Catz,Oracle co-president, said in a conference call with analysts. "A number of deals should have closed. We expanded (our salesforce). We do expect a significantly better quarter in Q3.

In October, Oracle agreed to pay $1.5 billion to buy RightNow Technologies, a maker of customer relationship management software for cloud computing.

Earlier this month, Oracle's top business software rival, SAP (NYSE:SAP - News), said it would buy SuccessFactors (NYSE:SFSF - News), another cloud-based software company, for $3.4 billion.

Oracle and SAP are scrambling to drum up more cloud-based business, says BMO's Keirstead.

"They're late, and they're acquiring to catch up," he said.