Larry Ellison came out swinging during Oracle’s earnings call last week. And his top targets revealed the swiftly changing dynamics within the Cloud Wars. Over the past 2-3 years, Ellison has used the quarterly earnings calls to dismiss SAP as a primary competitor, saying its lack of modern cloud applications had convinced Oracle to focus on Workday instead. But in last week’s call, Ellison unloaded on SAP. Oracle’s fast-growing Cloud ERP business, he said, would eventually enable Oracle to dethrone SAP as the world’s #1 ERP vendor. That prospect would have been laughed at until recently—and SAP will certainly have its own take on who’s going to rule the ERP roost for the next decade. But as always in the Cloud Wars, the big winners will be the business customers benefitting from all that competition.

As Ellison went on to talk about the stupendous growth of his Autonomous Database, he also saw fit to backhand Microsoft, IBM and any and all makers of open-source database products. Ellison made his most-aggressive remarks ever about the superior business value and technological capability of his self-driving database. We’ll keep a close eye on this incredibly strategic slice of the market to see if customers put their money where Ellison’s big talk is.