Keeping up its profile while playing catch-up to the public cloud giants, Oracle announced new cloud regions and a new bare metal service today at an event in New York.

Dubbed Cloudworld, the one-day conference — being reprised in Korea later this week — echoed much of the cloud messaging Oracle served up last fall at OpenWorld, the company's gargantuan customer and partner event.

CEO Mark Hurd repeated his belief that nearly all applications will move to the cloud, the only exceptions being old applications where the cost of moving can't be justified. "This is not a what-if. This is the way things are going to go," he said. "It will, in the short term, cause chaos in our industry. I'm talking about our industry, the one Oracle competes in."

To that end, Oracle officials say all of the company's applications have been rewritten for cloud readiness. And of course, Oracle has begun a major push to provide many flavors of cloud, including infrastructure, platforms, and software in "as-a-service" form (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS).

That's landed Oracle in a battle against Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, and Salesforce.com.

Oracle claims to be the fastest growing among all these competitors, which might be true, given that the company started from a small installed base.

Exemplifying that growth, Oracle announced three new cloud regions today. The regions are in Reston, Virginia; London; and an unspecified location in Turkey. That brings Oracle's total to 29 regions, compared with 34 for Azure or 16 for AWS.

Relevant to Oracle's core business of databases, the company announced a bare-metal version of its Database Cloud Service.

Finally, Oracle reached out to developers with a series of events called Oracle Code, 20 of which are planned worldwide between March 1 and Aug. 30. The Code sessions will include hands-on labs and technical sessions.