Larry Ellison: We don't pay attention to SAP or IBM as they're nowhere to be seen in the cloud

Ellison says that Salesforce.com, Workday, Microsoft and Amazon are Oracle's key rivals now

Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison told delegates at the opening keynote of Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco that the company is no longer paying attention to its fierce rivals SAP and IBM because it believes that neither of the firms have a significant presence in the cloud.

"The two companies that we have looked at over the years, IBM and SAP, we no longer pay attention to them - and it's quite a shock," said Ellison.

"I can make the case that IBM was the greatest company in the history of companies - but they were never in the cloud. SAP was the largest apps company that ever existed, but is nowhere in the cloud," he added.

Ellison drilled down into the areas that he feels Oracle has a presence. In the applications space, he said Oracle was competing with Salesforce.com and Workday, but not SAP.

"We see [Salesforce.com and Workday] mostly when we are in the market, and we almost never ever see SAP - this is a stunning change," he said.

"The largest app company in the world is SAP, but we never see them in the cloud, and we sell a lot of apps in the cloud," he continued.

Ellison explained that Microsoft is the only traditional company that is now competing in all three areas where Oracle has a presence: software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

"Most cloud companies are not [in every layer of the cloud], Microsoft and Oracle are the only two," he said.

He said there was some overlap with Microsoft, but that the two companies were providing different kinds of services within each of these 'cloud layers'.

In the infrastructure space, Ellison said that Oracle mainly competes with Amazon Web Services. He suggested that the firm sees Google in the market but "not that often".

He said that EMC wasn't seen in the market as often as it once was either, but that it "never ever sees IBM".