Oracle's cloud is the entire Earth, and all our rivals need us, proclaims Larry Ellison

'It's rude, but it's the truth' says founder and CTO as he rips into SAP, Salesforce and Workday

Larry Ellison's Oracle Openworld 2014 keynote was light on exciting announcements today, as he instead chose to try and stamp the company's authority on the cloud, attempting to finally show that he's changed his mind about the technology he once mocked.

Warming up by suggesting that Oracle wanted to be more than a "specialist" - as he said Salesforce is in SaaS and Amazon is in IaaS, Ellison stated that Oracle has something to offer customers at every level of the stack - for the simple reason that all other major cloud companies use the Oracle cloud anyway.

"That Oracle database of 35 years ago, was a relational database, and the first in the world. It was really cool. But a lot's happened in 35 years," said Ellison, who recently stepped down from his position of CEO of the company he founded in 1977, becoming instead executive chairman and CTO.

"Virtually every important cloud service on the planet earth runs on our database. So Salesforce, they run on our database. SAP - I'm trying to be nice. So hard," he quipped, before turning up the dial.

"‘We power the cloud' - whose cloud? What are they talking about?" he roared.

"Ariba runs on Oracle. SuccessFactors runs on Oracle, they just bought Concur - it runs on Oracle. I've got no idea what they mean, but their cloud runs on Oracle.

"It's rude, but it's the truth," he concluded, before returning to his earlier quote from SAP rhetoric.

"'We power the cloud!' What cloud? Let's just talk about Earth," he exploded, teasingly adding, "I really like those guys".

Ellison later burst out laughing while mentioning Netsuite, and called Workday "missing in action".

Ellison boasted that 2014 has seen Oracle finally perfect a level of standards-based, highly portable cloud infrastructure that is light years ahead of rivals.

"We've been doing this for a long time, it's harder. The reason we didn't do it in 2012 - is it's harder," he emphasised. "It's a lot of work. All those applications, building infrastructure as a service, a standards-based platform. It's a big job."

A reference perhaps to SAP and its ongoing licensing debates with its customers followed, in which Ellison proudly stated that "you can move from on-premise into the cloud, and you can move it back. We're the only cloud that gives you the choice. It's the same exact application either way. You don't like our prices, you can say. ‘Hey Oracle, I'm running on-prem. I've got choices'.

"At any one time I can decide to move it some place else."

Ellison swore that Oracle's IaaS will be able to take on Amazon on a price level, and backed up his claims of Oracle's growing dominance in the cloud by quoting figured such as 2,181 new SaaS customers in 2014, with 959 taking out contracts in the company's HCM (human capital management) services while 263 took on ERP (enterprise resource planning).

Finally, Ellison reminded delegates of the company's M7 processor, which includes security features at the silicon level, and when used in server hardware moving forward should prove a game-changer, as it "can only access what it's meant to, otherwise it'll stop".

It was as passionate and energetic a performance from Ellison as ever, particularly as a malfunctioning slide clicker meant the reappearance of his old catchphrase "Next slide please", but how doth the industry legend protest too much? Expect Computing to do some poking around at Open World for the next few days in an attempt to pick up some wider discussion and industry opinion.