<p>Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison didn't want to get into the infrastructure cloud business, but the company's customers have pushed for Oracle to do it.</p><p>At the opening keynote at the OpenWorld customer and partner extravaganza in San Francisco on Sunday night, Ellison announced a new lineup of Exadata X3 database clusters and previewed the "cloud-ready" Oracle 12c database that will be the focus of more detailed announcements today. Ellison gave a history lesson on cloudy software and infrastructure and also announced that Oracle would be offering raw infrastructure with some limits on its Oracle Cloud, taking on Amazon's AWS cloud and other service provider and server maker rivals who are puffing up their own clouds.</p><p>And unlike industry juggernaut Amazon, which does not believe in private clouds, Ellison and therefore Oracle most certainly does, and therefore Oracle will be selling customers like banks, insurance companies, and governments chunks-o'-cloud infrastructure that is identical to the iron running in Oracle's own public cloud that they can install privately behind their firewalls and have Oracle run it.</p><p>Ellison was not only there when the software-as-a-service revolution got going, he hedged his bets even as Oracle was building its own monolithic application suites back in the late 1990s and bought a stake in NetSuite, which has become one of the dominant online ERP software companies and which, as Ellison loves to point out, came out six months before Marc Benioff left Oracle to found online CRM provider Salesforce.com.</p><p><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/01/oracle_infrastructure_cloud/">Keep reading...</a></p>