Describing the importance he placed upon the utility computing development, Ellison explained:

"The industry has been on a quest to build bigger and bigger mainframes for the last 40 years. We've been chasing the same dream of building the fastest computer in the world," he explained. "After 40 years, now there's an alternative to the one, big server approach. It's enterprise grid computing."

Ellison expounded on the "one, big server approach" and the issues that have plagued it: limited capacity, high cost, and limited reliability. When the one server goes down, the application also goes down.

The answer, he advocated, is moving to grid computing, a new architecture that connects low-cost computers, storage and networks together to act as one computer, but at a fraction of the cost and with ultimate reliability -- there is no single point of failure.

"It's capacity on demand. Plug another server into the grid and the application runs faster and more reliably, and the capacity is inexpensive."

Ellison claimed that comparison of a single IBM mainframe with an Oracle grid built with Intel-based blades will result in a 30-to-1 cost savings for customers.

Denigrating IBM's Computing On-Demand strategy a "financing option," Ellison emphasized that the Oracle 10g range of products which his company will be shipping by the end of the year are major technology advances.