There has been much speculation in recent months about Oracle's future direction following an acquisition of Sun Microsystems and Founder Larry Ellison's remarks about cloud computing. Chairman Ellison has made widely-reported, disparaging comments about cloud computing.  Because the Sun acquisition recently received European regulators' approval, Sun's goal of offering open cloud services is likely to end under Oracle ownership.

Oracle has decided not to join the competition in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) space. But those offering Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), such as Microsoft Azure and Salesforce.com, will likely see more competition from Oracle in the future. First, Oracle has a broad spectrum of BPM, ERP and CRM suites. Second, the Sun acquisition adds Java, Glassfish and MySQL to the cornucopia of technologies that boost PaaS credentials.

Oracle is also releasing a cloud-based version of the OpenOffice suite. Cloud Office will put Oracle in competition with online office suites from Microsoft and Google. Oracle has announced that going forward it will continue to support the Linux and Solaris operating systems.