There are a number of Java-centric PaaS vendors that would make likely acquisition targets for Oracle, including CloudBees and CumuLogic.

Still, Oracle isn't necessarily hoping to generate massive amounts of pure PaaS revenue with Public Cloud, instead using it partly as a hedge against competing PaaS offerings who might tempt its user base, according to Perry.

"In the end Oracle is going to try to do what they always do, which is bundle it with other licenses and shove it down the throats of their enterprise customers, who are already locked in," he said. For example, Oracle could throw in a US$1 million credit for use with the Public Cloud PaaS when signing a big on-premise database license deal, Perry said.

Oracle is entering the PaaS market at a busy time and will compete with the likes of Microsoft Azure, VMware Cloud Foundry and Amazon Web Services.

But there's room for multiple players in PaaS because the "tipping point" won't arrive until 2016 when more than half of all spending on applications will occur in the cloud, according to analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. Constellation estimates that overall spending on public cloud services will grow from $28.2 billion in 2011 to $80.1 billion in 2016, numbers that include everything from infrastructure to applications, according to Wang.