Oracle had a lot to say during its OpenWorld conference last week, causing quite a stir in the industry. Some competitors and clients may have been dismayed by Oracle’s claims to operate as big a chunk of the enterprise cloud as possible, but many data storage companies saw a spike in shares thanks to Larry Ellison’s glowing comments over one company in particular.

The Oracle CEO, speaking at the conference, said he “coveted” NetApp’s storage business, which primarily brokers Oracle’s databases for its storage solutions, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The attention from Ellison has resurfaced projections of NetApp being an acquisition target for Oracle.

WSJ goes on to say that “the news sent shares of NetApp, as well as other storage companies, sharply higher Friday. In afternoon trading, NetApp was up 5.3% at $50.86, while competitor Isilon Systems Inc. rose 4.1% to $24.61, and Compellent Technologies Inc. jumped 2.9% at $19.26. Oracle shares were down 1% at $26.85.”

One of our own contributors Stephen Foskett made an early call on Oracle’s interest in NetApp, saying “‘Moving the needle’ for Oracle would take a much-larger purchase. NetApp is the perennial top-five enterprise storage company, bringing in nearly $4 billion in revenue and $2.5 billion in gross profit annually.

“They have a wide range of SAN, NAS, and backup technology as well as software, services, and solid sales presence. An Oracle/NetApp combination would have little Sun overlap and would place the company in a duel with IBM for the number-two spot in external storage sales.”

The cloud industry has been on a tear in general, with several of the large players taking up acquisitions as their summer hobby. It’s driving a great deal of investor attention the way of cloud startups, giving way to a number of specialized cloud service bundles as each pushes their competitive advantage.