With typical bombast, technology behemoth Oracle has announced a plethora of product and strategy announcements at the start of its annual user event, OpenWorld. But the big message boils down to one idea: "Get on to our cloud."

That has been the gospel as preached in opening keynotes by founder and former CEO Larry Ellison, now the company's chair and chief technology officer, and Mark Hurd, Oracle's new joint CEO (along with Safra Catz).

“2014 has been a very important year for Oracle. It’s been an inflection point - a turning point actually,” said Ellison on Sunday evening - the inflection being the company’s full-on cloud focus and, as Hurd claimed yesterday, dominance in the “depth and breadth” of its cloud and other offerings.

“We are very focused on cloud,” said Hurd in a press briefing after his keynote. “We are the company that’s ahead in the cloud. Oracle sits today with the strongest suite of cloud capabilities, comparable to no one.”

Hardware and applications offered by the company are designed with the cloud in mind, whether customers choose an in-house cloud or to use Oracle’s own public cloud offering.

And the company is betting that if an organisation starts by using Oracle cloud-based applications (software as a service, SaaS), it is likely to be compelled to use its infrastructure to host and manage them (infrastructure as a service, IaaS) and the broader range of integrated software and hardware in its platform as a service (PaaS) to create and deploy them.

Where other competitors offer one or another of these services as a speciality, Oracle offers all three, Ellison said, taking typical keynote potshots at competitors like Amazon, SAP and Salesforce. com.

“We had to deliver SaaS and PaaS and infrastructure as a service, integrated, because of a promise we made to customers over 30 years ago,” Ellison said, pointing to Oracle’s commitment to make successive waves of products “upward compatible” - able to work on newer computing platforms, such as the migration from microcomputers and mainframes to desktops, or from desktops and servers to the cloud.

Ellison announced a number of products that would either update or add to suites of Oracle offerings - so many that he simply showed slides with lists of products. The following day, Hurd noted that customers can start with single applications and then add them in to broader suites of related products.

“This is going to be extremely attractive to customers. You can build apps without owning any assets,” he said.

On the hardware side, Ellison announced a new (and awkwardly titled) Zero Data Loss Recovery Machine (Ellison quipped that he named it before Hurd could change it), which can backup not just data but full databases, and on the fly so that information is fully up to date.

A new flash storage enterprise SAN (storage area network), available in November, incorporates a Sparc processor that runs some of Oracle’s software at chip level, said Ellison.

“We’ve actually put database accelerator engines into our processors. We can speed up memory access and can spin out results at the speed of memory. This is literally putting some of our database software directly into silicon.”

The company intends to price its IaaS to go head to head with Amazon and other companies in this area, said Ellison and Hurd. Hurd said Oracle would commit to keeping IaaS costs low.

Oracle will also address both large and middle market companies, stressed Hurd. In his keynote, he brought out a range of chief information officers from large companies such as Proctor and Gamble and Xerox, all beginning to make transitions over to cloud computing.

“This is a big transformation for these big companies. Most of these companies have bought applications that are old, and they’ve customised them,” making any change slow and difficult because the applications are unique. But “when they transform [TO THE CLOUD], they will bring the whole market with them,” said Hurd in the briefing.

The markets were not initially persuaded by the Oracle message so far, with Oracle shares closing down slightly yesterday after digesting the keynotes.