The service will provide customers with access to secure, virtualized compute power hosted in an Oracle data center, Ellison said. Oracle will also sell software for customers to build "identical services" in their own data centers, allowing them to move workloads back and forth between the public and private clouds, he said.

Ellison made his remarks during a conference call to discuss Oracle's quarterly earnings.

The new service means Oracle will be able to provide "all three tiers of cloud computing," Ellison said, spanning applications, a PaaS (platform as a service) in the form of a Java development platform and database, and now an infrastructure offering that could put it into competition with Amazon Web Services, which Ellison has praised in the past.

The public-private cloud aspects of the service mean it will also rival services and products from IBM, Hewlett-Packard and others.

Ellison didn't provide any details about the service, including pricing or availability. runs Sept. 30 to Oct. 4 in San Francisco.