Oracle announces 10 new cloud services while CEO Larry Ellison escapes to watch boats

While the cloud titans are continuing their battle for dominance, Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison is watching another epic battle — the America’s Cup.

Oracle announced at its OpenWorld conference today that is has added 10 cloud services, expanding “the industry’s most comprehensive cloud portfolio.”

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The new services include compute cloud, object storage cloud, database cloud, Java cloud, business intelligence cloud, documents cloud, mobile cloud, database backup cloud, billing and revenue management cloud, and cloud marketplace.

Oracle’s goal is to provide every cloud service that an enterprise would need. This means those big businesses don’t have to manage a slew of different vendors and can satisfy all their cloud computing needs in one place. Oracle, of course, benefits by keeping customers away from the competition.

Compute cloud and object storage cloud rival offerings from Amazon Web Services. Cloud marketplace looks a lot like Salesforce’s AppExchange, and the billing and revenue management app resembles Zuora’s product.

Cloud computing is an extremely competitive space, with startups, quickly growing midsized businesses, and legacy providers all jockeying for customers as the enterprise continues its shift to the cloud. The incumbents, like Oracle and SAP, are dedicating significant resources and making a number of acquisitions in an effort to keep up with younger, more agile companies.

Oracle was a bit late out of the gate with cloud computing. Ellison, the company’s colorful CEO, said in the past that true cloud solutions were “water vapor” and “idiocy,” but after cloud-computing proved to be more than a fad, he realized that Oracle needed to hop onboard.

And hop onboard it has, with vigor. The company struck partnerships with Microsoft and Salesforce this year and is rapidly churning out cloud products.

Research firm Gartner predicted that the public cloud services market will grow by 18.5 percent this year and will reach $131 billion worldwide. Cloud services are fundamentally changing how large and small businesses operate, and Oracle is working hard to stay in the game.

Oracle revealed today that the Oracle Cloud supports 9 million people and 19 billion transactions each day, running on 7,000 servers and 200 petabytes of storage in 13 data centers around the world.

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While all these announcements were happening, Ellison was conspicuously absent. He blew off his second keynote speech today to watch the America’s Cup finals. Ellison is an avid sailing fan, and Oracle is the official sponsor of America’s team. This did not go over too well with many of the 60,000 registered attendees, who paid big bucks to attend.

Ellison was also absent from Oracle’s quarterly earnings conference call last week for the same reason.

By the way, Oracle Team USA won its seventh consecutive race against New Zealand today.