Larry Ellison: Amazon, Salesforce.com Are Now Oracle's Biggest Competitors

That's the message he gave yesterday at a keynote speech in San Francisco in an event to promote Oracle's human resources cloud.

With that, he declared that his biggest competitor in the hardware market "used to be IBM, now I think it's Amazon," he said on stage. As PC World's James Niccolai reports, he also said:

"Our competitors are this whole new generation of cloud companies. We're focused on the infrastructure companies like Amazon and the SaaS companies like Salesforce ...

"We just swapped a bunch of big guys-IBM and SAP-for a bunch of other guys; small but agile."

The focus on the cloud is understandable. All the giant enterprise IT companies are doing the same - HP, Dell, Cisco, VMware, etc. - because cloud promises to be a huge, fresh area of growth as enterprises buy more of their IT needs as a monthly service delivered over the Internet instead of buying software and hardware and building it all in-house themselves.

Enterprise spending on the type of cloud computing that Amazon offers is currently growing by 36% a year. This will be a $20 billion market by the end of 2016, the 451 Group Reports.

Oracle won't shake IBM off its tail that easily. IBM has also vowed to grab the cloud computing market away from Amazon and is gunning to turn cloud computing into a $7 billion business for itself by the end of 2015.