Oracle plans to offer virtually all its software on the cloud by mid-October. It won’t stop selling its “engineered systems” hardware for data centers, of course, but you can run Oracle software without it, says one of the firm’s chiefs.  

Before Oracle OpenWorld in October, 95 percent of the database software giant’s services will be available as cloud products, said co-CEO Mark Hurd last week in an interview with Bloomberg. The move follows promises to move quickly to the cloud, from former CEO Larry Ellison.

Not protecting the on-premise option

Oracle is still investing in traditional products, said Hurd, but is ”moving those products to now be available in the cloud at a really incredible pace. We are not protecting, so to speak, anything.”

Oracle, like Microsoft, SAP and other old-school software vendors, has a dilemma in that cloud versions available on demand cannibalize its exisitng business model, based on licenses. 

It has to move to the cloud - and currently Oracle offers 65 percent of its products on the cloud today, making more than $500 million of sales in various cloud options in the most recent quarter. By late 2014, virtually all Oracle’s software will be available in either form, Hurd told Bloomberg.

Oracle has been on a cloud hiring spree, particularly in the Asia Pacific region - where news emerged in March that the firm wants to hire 1000 new cloud sales staff.

The company’s cloud business includes platform as a service, where Ellison has promised to match the price of Amazon’s AWS platform. To deliver this, it has data centers in many locations including the US, Singapore and the UK.

In parallel with all this, of course, Oracle is selling data center hardware, with big storage and server efforts, based around “engineered systems” using its SPARC processor, and including converged systems which bundle servers, network and storage - which it says are cheaper than the EMC-backed VCE products.