BACKGROUND:

Ellison's views of could be described as having evolved during the past five years. There are multiple YouTube clips of Ellison disparaging cloud computing, calling it a fad, nonsense and "gibberish."

"When is this idiocy going to stop?" Ellison said at a 2008 analyst conference (). "What the hell is cloud computing?" he has asked multiple times publicly. In that video Ellison goes on to say Oracle will get into the cloud for marketing and sales. "Whatever, we'll make cloud computing announcements because, you know, if orange is the new pink, then we'll make orange blouses," he says. "I mean, I'm not going to fight this thing ... maybe we'll do an ad. I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than marketing, than, you know, change the wording on some of our ads. It's crazy."

A year later, Ellison was equally dismissive of the cloud, saying that it has become an all-encompassing term to define anything in enterprise computing. "My objection is the absurdity," he says, before launching into a colorful rant, while taking a shot at venture capital investors spreading the .

Since then, Ellison has seemed to come around to the idea of the cloud though. During the past two years Oracle has been aggressively building out a broad cloud strategy through both internal development and major spending on mergers and acquisitions. Two years ago at Oracle OpenWorld Oracle's cloud would be a "comprehensive development and execution environment that could run virtually all of your ." This summer Ellison held a much-hyped press conference in which he changed the name of the company's cloud strategy from Oracle Fusion to Oracle Cloud.