Is Oracle's cloud hype paving the way for that Salesforce buyout?

Does Oracle's news mean the prodigal son is returning home?

So yesterday we learned that Oracle is now aiming to "play at all three layers of the cloud", largely rolling all of its services into an entirely cloud-based SaaS and PaaS offering. And not a moment too soon, either. It's a far cry from founder Larry Ellison's "What the hell is cloud computing" outburst of 2008.

Oracle says it will now compete with Amazon Web Services, apparently dropping the notion that its venerable products and services have been ‘reassuringly expensive' when compared to the e-commerce upstart's continuing growth into the enterprise PaaS and SaaS markets.

Ellison reminded the world that "at the lowest layer of the cloud", Oracle offers "a compute service, a storage service and a network service" and that everything it does with those layers is "based on standards".

"OpenStack, Linux, Xen virtual machines, all of our applications are written in Java. Everything is based on industry standards," he emphasised, before adding: "This is different from other clouds in the marketplace".

He also talked about how Oracle currently owns Java, as well as supporting Node.js and has an "intention" to support "all of the popular programming languages in the Oracle cloud".

It sounds like Oracle's finally sharpening itself up - and decided to make this arguably massive announcement about its future not at its Oracle Openworld conference in September this year, but this week in June, at an otherwise unmarked event.

That's not like Oracle at all.

So what will September bring? Well, the dust's still not settled around those ‘Salesforce is for sale' rumours of a couple of months back.

So how about this: Oracle Openworld 2015's main announcement will be the big reveal that it's acquired Salesforce. Perhaps they'll build an Iron Throne made of server stacks for a sufficiently dramatic end to the Silicon Valley frenemy-bromance we all know and love.

Perhaps right now, Oracle's new cloud push is the company's attempt to prove itself a worthy and capable buyer for the "no software" mantra that Marc Benioff has been pushing for the 16 years his company has existed.

It's either a real, physical change, or a deft marketing drive to push-up stock prices when the sale goes through. Either way, a cloud-friendly Oracle - whether by practice, reputation, or both - will be a far more suitable partner for Benioff's marketing-led hype machine (as well as its products, which are undeniably decent).

Of course, Oracle already has CRM products, but nothing quite like Salesforce. Benioff has swallowed up so many great start-ups - Heroku, Tempo, ExactTarget to name but a few - that there's nothing really close to what it has to offer. It's also wrapped them all up into an irresistible mobile and even IoT-skewed little package.

And then there's the philanthropy side - everybody loves Larry, but he's the crazy rock n' roll billionaire who'd rather race boats than turn up to do a keynote.

Marc Benioff, as anyone who has watched commercial television in San Francisco for more than five minutes, cares about the children. And that's great for the stockholders.

Well, now Oracle cares about cloud, and that might be all that's needed to finally put a ring on it.