Larry Ellison of Oracle says he is ready to take on computer hardware giant IBM. Ellison is threatening to overtake them in control of the market share of business network hardware, and that includes high-end computer servers.

Ellison, who has been with Oracle since it was founded in 1977, was speaking during the prestigious All Things Digital conference during an “on-stage” discussion with Kara Swisher.

“Our biggest competitor is IBM,” Ellison said. “IBM was number one in databases. Now we are number one,” he said.

“And they were number one in middleware (programs that help different elements of a computer system communicate), now it’s us; they were number one in high-end servers, and we will be number one in the high-end servers.”

However Ellison pointed out that when it comes to services, Oracle cannot compete with the century-old IBM, which has made services a priority over the course of many years.

Today Oracle is ranked fourth worldwide in server market revenue, according to statistics released on Wednesday by IDC.  The leader in the server market is currently Hewlett-Packard with 29.3 percent of market share; IBM is second with 27.3 percent; and Dell has 15.6 percent.

Ellison also announced at the conference that as of June 6 all Oracle software will be available online in the internet “cloud.” He promised to send out his first “tweet” on the mini-blogging site Twitter on that historic day, to mark the occasion.