Oracle has a cost advantage from running its own software—"It's like eating out versus cooking at home"—plus she believes cloud infrastructure customers will buy more than just compute cycles. "Nobody says, 'Oh, infrastructure as a service is all I want," she said, likening it to going to Target for a sweatshirt and leaving with Doritos and headphones.  On the question of hardware, which Oracle highlighted in a recent proxy filing for growing more slowly than expected, Catz said Oracle's higher-margin engineered systems, which now represent about a third of the hardware business, continue to grow. As sales of lower-value systems continue to decline, and as more customers see the value in Oracle's approach, the strategy will be validated.  Read MoreMichael Dell on the state of PCs and going private  "Hardware ultimately is a scale game and it's a differentiation game," Catz said. "If you are literally selling products that are completely undifferentiated, like x86 servers, why would anybody pay you for that? You don't deserve a profit for that, unless you are—some people are in that business because they're the biggest guys. They get such economies of scale that though they make 50 cents on every one, 50 cents here, 50 cents there, before you know it it's 500 million. But for us, we've never been about being undifferentiated."  Catz also dismissed rival SAP's $8 billion plan to acquire Concur, announced this month on the same day as her ascension to CEO. "I remember thinking to myself, 'Oh my gosh, this acquisition of Concur is the best thing that's happened to me today."  That's because from her perspective SAP bought a midmarket business that specializes in just expenses in the cloud, a narrow portion of the enterprise resource planning suite Oracle already has. "And," Catz said, "they spent all of their money."
Oracle's CEO spoke about the company's acquisition strategy and dismissed skeptics who doubt Oracle's future in the cloud era.