Oracle's Larry Ellison pledges to shift EVERYTHING to the cloud and to compete head-on with Amazon

Ellison claims Oracle will have the broadest offerings in infrastructure, software and networking as a service - at AWS prices

Oracle founder, and executive chairman Larry Ellison has pledged to continue expanding the company's cloud offerings, shifting all applications to the cloud, as well as providing infrastructure and all popular programming languages - and competing directly with Amazon Web Services on price, too.

The promise was made in a webcast on Monday, after announcing new online storage and other capabilities that would enable Oracle customers to run their corporate applications in Oracle's cloud.

"It's Oracle's strategy to play at all three layers of the cloud: applications, known as SaaS [software-as-a-service]; platform, which includes data management, application development, analytics, integration and so on, also known as PaaS [platform-as-a-service] and, finally, the lowest level of the cloud, infrastructure, including compute, storage and networking as a service," he said.

Not only would everything Oracle offers also be available as a service in the cloud, he continued - including enterprise resource planning, supply chain and even manufacturing software, later this year - but he pledged to ensure price-competitiveness with Amazon, which is arguably the world's biggest and most influential cloud computing company.

Furthermore, though, Oracle would also provide tools and various popular open-source technologies in the Oracle cloud, too, he added.

"We are announcing today 24-plus PaaS and infrastructure services. They span a variety of categories. It includes data management and the Oracle database and a bunch of new database services, but it also includes Hadoop and a NoSQL key value store. It's all of the data management tech you need to manage all of your data in the Oracle cloud.

"In terms of application development, we proudly inherited Java when we bought Sun. it's the most popular programming language in the world, but it's not the only one. We support Node.js, Ruby. Our intention is to support all of the popular programming languages in the Oracle cloud.

"At the lowest layer of the cloud, we offer a compute service, a storage service and a network service. Everything we do with all three layers of the cloud are based on standards. Everything is based on standards: OpenStack, Linux, Xen virtual machines, all of our applications are written in Java. Everything is based on industry standards.

"This is different from other clouds in the marketplace, ours is based 100 per cent on industry standards," he said.

He continued: With today's announcement, we now have a complete suite of services for building applications in the cloud. We fill in the last of the major blocks with our new compute services. But we have also added a bunch of interesting features in our storage services and networking services...

"You can take virtually all of your applications out of the data centre and move them to the Oracle cloud. Not just Oracle applications, not just oracle databases and Java applications; but all of your applications, third-party applications, [and] custom applications. Everything can be moved from your data centre to the oracle cloud, easily, with the push of a button."

Topping it all off, though, was Ellison's pledge to compete with Amazon on price, too.

Oracle has been losing market share in its core database technologies to open source rivals, such as MariaDB and Mongo DB, as well as cloud providers - particularly Amazon with such offerings as DynamoDB. Indeed, if an organisation decides to run more and more of its applications in the cloud, it makes sense to migrate associated databases as well.

While Oracle has been boasting fast-increasing cloud revenues from a combination of its own developments and acquisitions, it has been outpaced by rivals, and has not been able to increase cloud revenues fast enough to offset a more challenging on-premises software market.