Oracle Social Network is part of the company's new Public Cloud lineup. It will serve as a high-profile competitor to the likes of rival Salesforce.com's Chatter as well as the array of speciality enterprise social-network vendors in the market.

OSN is "part of a much broader user engagement platform" powered by Oracle's WebCenter family of technologies, with the other pillars including Sites, Portals and Content, said Andy Kershaw, senior director of product management, during a webcast Thursday.

Companies are using collaboration tools today in a "very much siloed" manner, he said. For example, a conversation may begin in an instant-messaging program, but then one party to the discussion may later reply by e-mail and point someone to a document stored in yet another system.

"It's going to be tremendously difficult over time to understand how that decision was made or to share the decision-making process with others," he said.

OSN solves the problem by real-time communication, content sharing, integration with other business applications, activity streams and search tools, he said.