It appears big announcements are being planned for next week’s Oracle (ORCL) OpenWorld. According to an article published by the New York Times, Oracle CTO Larry Ellison will announce on Sunday night as the OpenWorld festivities get rolling that Oracle is getting into the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) business.

There doesn’t seem to be any reason to doubt the information, as it apparently came directly out of the mouth of new Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, who told the Times that the PaaS will be available to customers—and, we assume, partners—to build cloud applications.

OpenWorld kicks off Sept. 28 and will for sure have a fairly strong cloud focus. It will also be the first time Ellison has addressed the attendees not as the company’s head honcho.

For Oracle, this is a gauntlet being thrown down, and it’s being thrown in the direction of Microsoft (MSFT), which plays in both the PaaS and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) markets in the cloud computing space. The company is looking to be “on the attack” and will go after Microsoft, mostly because of the competitive nature of the two companies and their competing technologies.

The companies have long been rivals, of course. With several competing technologies, both in traditional IT and now in the cloud, Oracle and Microsoft are frequently at odds and fight over the same markets. But in this case, Oracle might not be considering the whole picture, as the Times article suggested Oracle was possibly focusing too much on Microsoft and not enough on other competitors in the space.

The move is still likely a good one for Oracle, potentially positioning it in the ever-growing PaaS market and getting its cloud offerings in front developers.