NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Lost amid the hoopla surrounding Oracle's hostile bid for PeopleSoft last Friday was Oracle's upbeat earnings preview.

The No. 2 software company said it was on target to report earnings of 14 or 15 cents a share, versus an estimate of 14 cents. The company was originally scheduled to report its earnings June 17, but this week announced that it would release them Thursday.

It seems that Oracle decided to bump up the earnings announcement since it is likely to have good news, said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. Decent fundamentals probably strengthens its bargaining power in the PeopleSoft deal.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison probably will spend a lot of time during Thursday's conference call defending the company's $16 a share cash offer for PeopleSoft, a bid that PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway on Friday called an example of "atrociously bad behavior."

A PeopleSoft spokeswoman said Tuesday that the company would not comment further on the offer until PeopleSoft's board meets and formally reviews the offer, which is expected in the next 10 business days.

But investors would be wise to focus on more than just the takeover soap opera. "Let's not ignore the fundamental course of business," said David Hilal, an analyst with Friedman Billings Ramsey.

If Oracle hits the 15 cents a share target, that would be a fairly significant feat since it would represent a year-to-year earnings increase, something the company has struggled to accomplish during the past few years.

"Continued cost cutting is going to help the bottom line," said Matt Kelmon, president of Kelmoore Investment Co., which owns more than a million Oracle shares. "The company is making money in one of the worst markets and there's room for earnings to go a lot higher."

Oracle did not give guidance about sales, however, and most analysts are more interested in the top-line growth numbers. According to First Call, analysts are expecting total sales of $2.75 billion for the fourth quarter, compared with $2.77 billion a year ago.

Oracle broke a sales slump in March when it reported its first annual sales increase in seven quarters. Despite this, analysts still were disappointed by a decline in new software licenses.

Although Ellison chastised analysts during Oracle's third-quarter conference call for focusing too much on the decline in license sales instead of the strength in support and maintenance revenue, most analysts argue that the reason Oracle and other software companies trade at premium valuations is that licensing is an extremely profitable business that drives growth.

"Licensing is the story," said Hilal. "All that other growth from services and maintenance comes from having new software business."

Barnicle thinks Oracle will bounce back with strong sequential license growth in both its core database business and the more lucrative applications business, which includes customer and supply chain management software.

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Oracle essentially is looking to buy PeopleSoft in order to eliminate a rival on the applications side. Oracle has already said that if its effort to buy PeopleSoft succeeds, it will not sell PeopleSoft products and will try and switch existing PeopleSoft customers to Oracle's suite of enterprise software.

Barnicle and Hilal both estimate Oracle will report $1.09 billion in new license revenue, a 44 percent increase from the third quarter. But Barnicle said the fourth quarter is typically Oracle's strongest, so what Wall Street is really hoping to see is an increase from the license revenue of $1.15 billion a year ago.

"If Oracle did $1.2 billion in licenses and reports earnings of 15 cents a share, the stock will rip on that," Barnicle said.

And with PeopleSoft's stock now hovering around $17.60 -- just 10 percent above Oracle's offer after surging as high as $18.90 Friday -- a strong earnings report could make it easier for Oracle to persuade PeopleSoft shareholders to agree to a deal. After all, Ellison's contention is that PeopleSoft's shareholders will suffer in the long run if the company remains independent and has to keep competing against Oracle.

Analysts quoted in this article do not own Oracle or PeopleSoft and their firms have not performed investment banking for either company.