I had a nice Holiday break with no landline, cell coverage, internet access, or broadcast TV from Dec 26 - Dec 31. I was sick with a bad cold for 3 days of bed rest and I only had a kindle and saved movies to pass the time. It was a forced withdrawal which actually was good medicine in itself.

One of the things I missed is this post by my GigaOm friend Barb Darrow on Oracle’s intent to make 2014 a year to compete against AWS.

“Down at the infrastructure level, we intend to be price competitive with Amazon and Microsoft Azure and Rackspace. 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 a service and the same customer a highly differentiated platform as a service will let us get better margins and highly differentiated suite of enterprise applications for the cloud.”

I was chatting with an Oracle data center executive at 7x24 Exchange and we joked about how the Sun acquisition slowed Oracle’s data center expansion and how Oracle has learned the Sun data centers were not that great, and they were now expanding their existing facilities and building more.

In a research note, Nomura Securities analyst Rick Sherlund, pointed to Oracle opening up its 17th data center worldwide as proof that its building out infrastructure for this cloud push.