Larry Ellison promised he was going to talk about cloud computing and he certainly didn’t let us down.

The Oracle CEO, during an hour-long address to kick off Oracle OpenWorld on Sunday night, outlined no less than four key initiatives that make up the company’s infrastructure-as-a-service cloud plan, whilst also taking the time to have a little dig at some of their key rivals in the industry.

Among Oracle’s new products and services, Ellison seemed most enthusiastic about the latest version of its 12c database software. Of this, Ellison said that the updated version has been fine-tuned to operate on all manner of multi-tenant environments that are typically seen in the cloud, where software has to be compatible with a variety of different machines in multiple different locations.

The second of Oracle’s initiatives is a newly updated version of their ExaData database machine, which is used by companies to consolidate all of their databases into just one machine. Unlike traditional servers, ExaData runs its databases “in memory”, which means that it relies on banks of flash memory chips rather than conventional hard drives to store its data. Another advantage is that ExaData uses advanced compression technology, meaning that databases are condensed to be much smaller – saving on costs whilst allowing things to run that much faster.

Ellison also let us in on two new cloud services soon to be offered by Oracle – one of which is a private cloud service similar to Amazon Web Services, only theirs would be based on hardware installed in the user’s machine and managed remotely by Oracle. According to Ellison, the service would be almost identical to its current public cloud service, where the hardware is owned and operated by Oracle, only the company would run it remotely “on your floor”. Ellison gave away very few details about its second new cloud offering however, simply describing it as an “infrastructure-as-a-service” product.

Aside from exciting us with Oracle’s new products and services line-up, Ellison also took the time to get a few jabs in against his competitors, reminding audiences that Netsuite, a company in which he owns a substantial number of shares, is actually the original cloud computing company having been launched in 1998, one year before Salesforce.com came into being. Ellison also insisted that Oracle’s latest hardware is faster than anything offered by the likes of SAP and IBM.

Update: SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier provides breaking analysis of Ellison’s keynote speech in today’s edition of News Desk

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