The ever-acquisitive company, which blasted into the hardware market in 2010 by acquiring Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, has focused its purchases of late on social technology firms such as and Vitrue. Exactly what Oracle has planned for its social technology acquisitions remains unclear, but Hurd shed some light on social, which he described more as "a set of capabilities" than as a pure product play.

"It's getting our apps [such as e-commerce servers] to work in that mobile social environment," Hurd says. "It's getting our apps to engage and transact in that environment. It's a big differentiator for us."

Increasingly for Oracle, those apps are being sold via a software-as-a-service model that now generates $1 billion in annual revenue and hasn't caused the company to miss a step profit margin-wise, according to Hurd. The company has been working for six or seven years to build out its Fusion on a common middleware layer that enables greatly improved developer productivity and high-level integration across apps, according to Hurd.

"We now have the ability to give you SaaS out of the Oracle cloud, to build a private cloud for you and/or have you use the same applications on-premise," says Hurd, who acknowledges that budget- and innovation-challenged customers are still feeling their way through new computing models and the impact they have on everything from service-level agreements to and performance. "We will be the only company in the industry that has a suite of capability available."

Oracle CEO that the company would deliver the world's "most comprehensive cloud," and Hurd assures that Oracle will have most of its apps available on the Oracle Cloud by year-end.