Oracle(s orcl) execs do not typically like to utter the “C-word.” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has engineered (pardon the pun) the company’s move from “commodity” servers to costlier “engineered systems.” The company pushes its database and applications as high-end enterprise-class software — worthy of high support charges. But apparently, commodity cloud infrastructure is one area where the software giant intends to play and play hard starting next year.

“Down at the infrastructure level, we intend to be price competitive with Amazon(s amzn) and Microsoft(s msft) Azure and Rackspace(s rax). So we intend to compete aggressively in, what I will call — commodity not being a bad word — the commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service marketplace,” Ellison told analysts on the company’s second quarter earnings call last week.

That Oracle IaaS is envisioned as a platform to run all that higher-end Oracle software goodness. The idea, Ellison continued “is to sell our customers infrastructure as…