"We're the only one who gives you a choice of deployment," Ellison said, noting that Salesforce.com customers don't have the option to move its cloud applications into their own data center.

Customers could do initial testing on the Oracle public cloud and then do a production deployment on a private cloud, he added.

While some may see Oracle's full-stack approach to the cloud as the ultimate vendor lock-in, Ellison said all of Oracle's technology is based on open standards such as Java and Linux.

"Standards are still important," he said. "Just because we're in the cloud we don't forget everything we've learned over the past 20 years of computing."

He also sought to dispel any notion that cloud services amount to magic for customers.