Oracle has finally worked out that the Cloud is the right place for a dull outfit like a database company to end up.

Ellison has not been happy about using the C word and has been late in bringing his company into the cloud. Oracle has developed an ambitious array of cloud computing services in a bid to catch up with Amazon and Salesforce.

When Larry Ellison unveiled them he was jolly enthusiastic. This is a complete conversion to several years ago when he mocked cloud computing. The new offerings include an "Oracle Public Cloud" and software for managing tasks such as sales and human resources, a database, security technology and a platform for writing Web applications with Oracle's widely used Java software.

Ellison said that programs and data that Oracle hosts on its cloud can easily be moved to a customer's own data centre or Amazon's rival cloud. However it would not be compatible with web-based offerings from rival Salesforce.com, which runs on proprietary standards that are not compatible with other networks.