Little bit different

"Our cloud's a little bit different. It's both platform as a service and applications as a service," he said while a keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, which was webcast. "The key part is that our cloud is based on industry standards and supports full interoperability with other clouds. Just because you go to the cloud doesn't mean you forget everything about information innovation from the past 20 years."

Fusion Applications are supposed to combine the best attributes of Oracle's various business software lines into a then and there-generation suite. The initial release includes some 100 modules. Fusion is differentiated from SAP, Salesforce.com, Workday and other applications by the fact it can be run either on-demand or on-premises, Ellison said.