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Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison unveiled a high-end server with more memory Sunday evening, and the tech company updated its flagship database to compete against SAP in meeting businesses' growing information needs.

Oracle will also sell computing power and storage, applications software and its database as a cloud service businesses can rent instead of buying outright, Ellison said in the opening address of the company's OpenWorld conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

"You can access all of these services across the network," said Ellison. "It makes sense for Oracle to be in all three tiers of cloud services."

Oracle, the world's largest supplier of database software, is jockeying with SAP, the top business applications maker, as well as Salesforce.com and Workday, for the edge in cloud computing for businesses. Its revamped 12c database, the first new version in five years, will let customers move their computing jobs from data centers to the Internet, Ellison said.

The company's addition to its Exadata line of servers, called the X3, will be able to house as much as 22 terabytes of flash computer memory and four terabytes of DRAM in a single server rack to greatly speed up business reports. That's four times as much flash storage per rack than a previous version of Exadata, Ellison said.

"If you thought the old Exadatas were fast, you ain't seen nothing yet," said Ellison.

He said Oracle is "ideally positioned" to deliver many components of hardware and software - including its database, application-connecting middleware and computer systems - as a cloud computing service delivered entirely through the Internet, or with some equipment sitting in customers' data centers.

"Oracle should be in this business," said Rick Sherlund, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc., who recommends buying the shares. "Oracle has to reposition for the cloud."

Ellison has said the 12c database will let Oracle serve multiple companies' data-processing needs from the same information storehouse and will arrive by early next year. The company's Exadata and Exalogic systems, plus its database, Java development tools and social-media analysis software, can be delivered to businesses as a service Oracle manages over the Internet, co-president Mark Hurd said in an interview last week.

International Business Machines, Microsoft and VMware are also vying to supply more of the platform software that can help companies move to cloud computing. SAP's High Performance Analytical Appliance uses hardware from IBM, Hewlett-Packard and others to store data in computer memory for faster analysis.

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Oracle bulks up cloud computing services