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This week at the Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in San Francisco, Calif., CEO Larry Ellison (News - Alert) announced the launch of a new cloud computing service during his keynote talk at the annual conference. The software company plans to offer "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS), which Oracle’s (News - Alert) chief dubbed it as "hardware as a service," reports Business Insider.

Under the IaaS service, companies rent all of the hardware and set it up to use the desired apps. Per Business Insider report, there are two versions of Oracle's new IaaS cloud. While one is a public cloud similar to Amazon, Rackspace, and HP, the second one is a private cloud. In the public space, the hardware is located in Oracle's data centers. And it includes compute services and storage services, wrote Business Insider reporter Julie Port. Similarly, in the private sector, the hardware is put in the customer's own data center. However, “Oracle would still own the hardware and be responsible for running it, securing it and updating it,” wrote Port.

With regards to the new private cloud service, Ellison told the conference attendees, "We own it. We manage it. We upgrade it. You only pay for what you use."

As per the report, Oracle is not the first company to offer private clouds. Other in this fray include HP, IBM and many others. However, wrote Port, Oracle's strong selling point here is that it uses exactly the same hardware and software in both public and private Cloud services. “That would be its Exalogic and Exadata computers,” according to Port. The report indicates that Oracle’s computers have been specifically designed to host its software and database.

Besides the two new cloud services, Ellison also unveiled a new kind of a database for cloud applications. It is labeled Oracle 12c (the c stands for cloud). As per the Business Insider report, it allows multiple companies to share the same database. Or, wrote Port, an organization with many Oracle databases can use 12c to consolidate all of them onto one set of server/storage hardware. The company said that Oracle 12c database will be available next year.

In addition, Ellison also revealed a direct competitor to rival SAP's (News - Alert) HANA database. The chief  introduced Exadata x3, telling the audience that it will be bigger and faster than HANA, including similar products from IBM (News - Alert) and HP and will cost much less. As per this report, Exadata x3 prices start at $200,000.

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