"We are betting big on the cloud with our most successful product, and we are investing heavily both in the product engineering side and the physical infrastructure side, " Tim O'Brien, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy, said last year when the company first unveiled a Web-based version of its Office software.

CNN: Microsoft's Office 365 available for public testing

As databases in general become more strategically vital, and as cloud technology becomes essential within advanced IT architectures, Oracle is betting that the combination of speed and cost-performance offered by its increasingly popular Exadata engineered systems will allow the company to stay well ahead of other alternatives.

FORBES: Larry Ellison: As We Thump IBM, Our Next Target Is Teradata