Oracle launched a new suite of cloud-based products on Wednesday to try to catch up with smaller in the business of hosting and distributing software via the cloud. In a major strategy update, Larry Ellison announced the company's Cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a broad Enterprise Social Platform offering.

"Almost seven years of relentless engineering and innovation plus key strategic acquisitions. An investment of billions. We are now announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth," said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. "Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don?t have platforms to extend. Oracle is the only vendor that offers a complete suite of modern, socially-enabled applications, all based on a standards-based platform."

Oracle Cloud delivers a set of integrated services that provide Oracle's customers with subscription-based access to Oracle Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all completely managed, hosted and supported by Oracle.

Oracle Cloud is powered by enterprise-grade infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic. It enables easy self-service for both business users and developers. Business users can order, configure, extend, and monitor their applications. Developers and administrators can develop, deploy, monitor and manage their applications.

Oracle Cloud Platform Services will include database services to manage data and build database applications with the Oracle Database; Java services to develop, deploy and manage Java applications with Oracle WebLogic; developer services to allow application developers to collaboratively build applications; web services to build Web applications rapidly using PHP, Ruby, and Python; mobile services to allow developers to build cross-platform native and HTML5 mobile applications for smartphones and tablets; documents services to allow project teams to collaborate and share documents through online workspaces and portals; sites services to allow business users to develop and maintain visually engaging .com sites; and analytics Services to allow business users to quickly build and share analytic dashboards and reports through the Cloud.

Oracle Cloud Application Services will provids access to the enterprise applications, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities. The Application Service include ERP Services, Human Capital Management (HCM) services, Talent Management Services, Sales and Marketing Services and Customer Experience Services.

Oracle Cloud Social Services will allow enterprises to engage with their customers on a range of social media properties in a meaningful fashion including social marketing, commerce, service and listening. The platform also provides enterprises with a social networking solution for their employees to collaborate effectively inside the enterprise. Oracle's integrated social platform will include Oracle Social Network, Oracle Social Data Services to aggregate data from social networks and Oracle Social Marketing and Engagement Services to enable marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Oracle Social Intelligence Services will also enable marketers to analyze social media interactions.

Oracle and rivals, such as SAP AG, are transforming themselves into major players in cloud computing - providing software, storage and other services from remote data centers over the Internet.

Ellison also said he noted that SAP doesn't expect to have a cloud offering until 2020.