When Oracle talks about "cloud," it's not in the same vein as Amazon Web Services (AWS). But will it always be that way?

Oracle's idea of cloud is all about running Oracle applications off-premises. The plan is patterned after the cloud trends that co-CEO Mark Hurd, in his Oracle OpenWorld keynote Monday morning, said will dominate the software industry.

AWS is treading on that turf, though. It provides the infrastructure for running practically anything, including databases that compete with Oracle's, for instance. But now, it's offering Aurora, an AWS-based database that Amazon officials say is AWS' fastest-growing service ever.

You have to wonder if Oracle, which owns cloud hardware prowess through the long-ago acquisition of Sun Microsystems, might fight back. Oracle could start offering bare compute resources to go along with that cloud subscription, for instance.

It doesn't sound like it will happen, but Oracle is still interested in infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS.)

"Infrastructure as-a-service, as a competitor to an [on-premises] server or an on-prem storage competitor — there's certainly a market," co-CEO Mark Hurd said Monday during a post-keynote session with the media. "We look at infrastructure as-a-service as an important market but one that gets pulled by our success in SaaS, or that gets pulled by our success in PaaS."

In other words, Oracle is interested in IaaS primarily as it relates to Oracle's own products. The hardware could be optimized for Oracle applications, and that would be an advantage against AWS and its vanilla hardware, Hurd said. (He believes Oracle's IaaS would be cheaper, too.)

"Think of us as highly differentiated at the SaaS layer" and the PaaS layer, while competing in IaaS on a selective, Oracle-minded basis, Hurd said.

With that in mind, Hurd views AWS as more "a competitor to many of the older tech/on-prem infrastructure companies."

Oracle CTO Larry Ellison will talk more about IaaS during a Tuesday afternoon keynote, Hurd said. Ellison will also discuss hardware-based security that's in the newest iteration of the Sparc processor architecture.