For those who came in late, Oracle reported sales from its cloud business that fell short of Wall Street expectations. The thought was that Oracle was losing ground to the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Amazon and Google which it might find hard to claw back.

Talking to the assembled throngs in Tel Aviv that the company’s cloud business was impacted by a new model made available to customers three quarters ago that resulted in much higher than projected licence growth.

“That makes the appearance of a lower number (for the cloud business) even though money is coming into another bucket”, Catz said.

“As this evens out I think we are going to start seeing cloud acceleration again that is very significant, but I don’t want to time that right now.”

Oracle last month said its quarterly cloud business revenue rose 31.7 percent to $1.57 billion, but fell short of the average analysts’ estimate of $1.59 billion.