Oracle moved firmly into the cloud computing arena yesterday, announcing new products and services that chief executive Larry Ellison said would outpace cloud offerings by rivals.

In his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, the company's annual conference here, Mr Ellison said Oracle would now offer cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) - access to Oracle?s range of hardware through its Oracle Public Cloud service.

Oracle will also now offer a private cloud service, providing Oracle-owned and managed hardware, running behind a client company's own firewall.

"We can put that infrastructure in our data centre and run it, or put it in your data cantre," he said. "We own it, manage it, and run it." Companies then pay for it as a service.

Companies can use the Oracle Private Cloud as an extension of the Oracle Public Cloud, for testing applications and software configurations or to manage excess capacity, and can move applications back and forth between the two clouds.

As had been expected, Oracle also announced the upcoming release of a new, cloud-focused version of its cornerstone database application, to be called Oracle 12c ("You might guess - the 'c' is for 'cloud'," Mr Ellison said).

He described it as "the first multi-tenant database" as it enables multiple "pluggable" databases to be run separately, and managed at the database level, rather than from software applications using the databases. This allows each database to be private and therefore provides greater data security, he said.

Oracle will also release the third version of its Exadata database machine, a piece of hardware that will now run databases entirely within DRAM and Flash memory, so that "you virtually never use your disk drives. Virtually everything is in semiconductor memory."

A single Exadata x3 machine has the power of 10,000 disk drives, Mr Ellison said. The machine will retail at $200,000 but he noted that the "street" price from Oracle salespeople would be less.

OpenWorld, one of the largest annual technology events, runs all week, with Mr Ellison giving a second keynote tomorrow. Last year, the event attracted 35,000 attendees and is prized by San Francisco as one of its biggest sources of visitor revenue. A city official said it was expected to bring in around $120 million.