"If there's one point I would like to make this afternoon, it's how hard it was, how long it took, how many people were involved, how much it cost," he said.

In contrast, rival SAP won't have anything "for real" in the cloud until 2020, Ellison claimed. "I don't think they'll make it. Our applications will have eight years of maturing. 2020. Excellent vision. 2020. Great news program. 2020. Terrible year to get to the cloud."

"All SAP's got is SuccessFactors," he said, referring to the cloud HCM (human capital management) vendor that SAP recently acquired. "I don't think that's enough." Oracle has made cloud acquisitions of its own in the form of , RightNow and Vitrue.

Those remarks drew a hasty response from SAP on Wednesday.

"As usual, you can tell who Oracle is most worried about by the competitors they criticize most," the company said in an emailed statement. "Building a profitable cloud business depends on scale -- with 17 million users, SAP's SuccessFactors business has the largest user base of any cloud apps provider." SAP is also offering a "complete ERP suite for the cloud today" in the form of Business ByDesign, and has many other "loosely coupled" cloud applications, the company added.