* Software AG Q4 opg profit up 28 percent
* Software AG confirms outlook
* WMware, JDA beat consensus, avoid outlook
* TI beats expectations, cuts jobs
By Tarmo Virki and Nicola Leske
HELSINKI/FRANKFURT, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Germany's Software AG on Tuesday joined U.S. business software peers VMWare and JDA Software in delivering forecast-topping fourth-quarter results, saying it had so far been untouched by the financial crisis. Shares in Germany's second-biggest software company after SAP surged after Software AG posted a 14 percent rise in fourth quarter revenue and a 28.3 percent increase in operating profit.
"We have hardly felt an impact from the financial crisis," Software AG's Chief Executive Karl-Heinz Streibich said, adding the firm saw good demand for products that help businesses become more efficient.
While Software AG confirmed its 2009 outlook, VMWare and JDA Software declined to offer full-year forecasts.
Elsewhere in the technology realm, chipmaker Texas Instruments posted a smaller-than-expected drop in quarterly profit and announced it would cut 3,400 jobs, or 12 percent of its workforce, helping to lift its shares in after-hours trading on Monday.
TI's smaller rival STMicro was due to release its results on Tuesday evening.
SOFTWARE AG SHINES
Software AG's shares were trading 7.9 percent higher at 42.49 euros at 1125 GMT as investors cheered the fourth-quarter results and the company's reaffirmed outlook.
Software AG has two main revenue streams -- one from helping companies modernise and manage applications for large mainframe computers, and the other from helping to design and deploy Web services and get the most out of older IT investments.
VMware, which makes virtualisation software for managing computer networks, reported fourth-quarter results that topped market expectations, but declined to give a full-year outlook, citing the uncertain global economy.
Chief Executive Paul Maritz said many of VMware's customers have yet to set their technology budgets for 2009 because business conditions are deteriorating so quickly.
"The challenge here is visibility," he said on a conference call. "We have never seen this level of uncertainty before."
Supply chain management software maker JDA Software posted better-than-expected quarterly results, helped by higher software license revenue and several software contracts that exceeded $1 million, but would not provide an outlook for 2009.
(Additional reporting by Nicola Leske in Frankfurt, Jim Finkle in Boston, and Jennifer Robin Raj and John Tilak in Bangalore; Editing by Hans Peters)