Amid faltering sales across its core traditional businesses, Oracle Corp. is moving aggressively to seize the momentum of its cloud business, the only major source of growth in an otherwise bleak revenue outlook, with new services. But the latest addition to the roster still comes as something of a surprise even in light of its increased efforts.

Oracle Commerce Cloud augments the company’s hosted customer experience management platform with pre-configured website components that can be used to quickly assemble online storefronts. The bundle includes standard piece parts such as themes and layouts in addition to more specialized business capabilities geared towards retailers.

The functionality encompasses every major aspect of maintaining an online store, including tools for managing catalogs and pricing, content management capabilities and integration with many of the backend solutions used to handle the more complicated operational sides of the task. That’s an always a selling point for enterprises with existing software investments to maintain, but Oracle has an entirely different audience in mind for the new service.

The company is not targeting large organizations that already have an established web presence along with the internal talent to add new features as required but rather small- and medium-sized businesses that can’t afford to match that on their own . Or in the case of many others, simply don’t have the will to invest the time and resources into such such a project when they can simply buy the complete package from Oracle for a subscription fee.

That’s a powerful value proposition in a time when the lower segments of the market are playing an increasingly important role in the fight over the public cloud. One of the vendor’s top rivals, Salesforce.com Inc., released an embedded version of its help desk service for small- and medium-sized businesses only last week, and the competition will only spread to more areas as the stakes continue to rise.

Oracle Commerce Cloud is the latest testament of that. It’s also a sign that Larry Ellison’s firm is unafraid to venture beyond familiar territory in its quest for growth, an effort aided by a training program launched in conjuction to help certify  partners in building storefronts for their customers. The push has already paid off, with Oracle touting several businesses that have signed up for the service  since testing began earlier this year.

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