Oracle's IaaS will include its operating system and virtualization technologies, and is powered by the company's Exadata, Exalogic and SuperCluster machines.

Although the offering will apparently aim directly for AWS customers, Ellison didn't make any direct criticisms of the company.

Instead, Ellison spent some time giving audience members a primer on the cloud computing concept as well as the curve of Oracle's thinking on the matter.

"The fundamental architecture of cloud computing is really a utility model that has been with us for 100 years or more," he said. "It looks exactly like the architecture of an electric utility. All of this is enormous, capital intensive stuff but it's managed by the electric utility and provided to the consumer as a service. The user simply plugs in to get it. All the capital costs are borne by the utility."

"We decided to get into cloud computing back in 2004, when we started our Fusion Applications project," he added. "It took us a long time to build a suite of cloud applications and the underlying suite for those applications. We had to build the platform first before we could really build the CRM applications that run in the cloud, the HCM applications that run in the cloud."