The Oracle chief also confirmed the that Oracle will announce the next version of its flagship database, 12c, at OpenWorld.

"There are some very exciting, specific features for the cloud," Ellison said, including "pluggable databases which allow multiple tenants to securely co-exist in the same database."

Database 12c won't be released until "December, January, February of next year," Ellison said.

Earlier Thursday, Oracle reported that net income for the quarter ended Aug. 31 rose 11 percent to US$2 billion, but that revenue fell 2 percent to $8.2 billion. The period was marked by some strength in software but a sharp drop in hardware revenue.

New software license sales and cloud subscription revenues rose 5 percent to $1.6 billion, Oracle said.