Ellison's mostly understated delivery of these comments stood in contrast to his past mockery of cloud computing as older technologies renamed and laden with fresh hype.

Overall, his keynote seemed to cement Oracle's commitment to the cloud computing market in all its flavors, or at least a recognition that it needs to have a viable offering at every level and to meet all customers' tastes.

To the latter end, Oracle announced the Oracle Private Cloud. It's the identical infrastructure [of the public IaaS] on our floor or your floor," he said. "You can't tell the difference. The software is identical in both places."

Oracle will own and manage the infrastructure as it's installed on the customer's site, behind their firewall, with fees paid as a monthly charge according to usage. Extra capacity could be added flexibly, and Oracle's public IaaS could also provide excess headroom, Ellison said.

Ellison also stressed that the Oracle Private Cloud is able to run other Oracle software besides Fusion Applications, such as E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and Siebel.