Oracle shares opened at $51.62 Thursday — an all time high for the company — putting the stock on pace for it's best day in 3 years, after better than expected fourth quarter earnings and revenue.
On CNBC's Squawk Alley, CEO Mark Hurd distinguished the company from it's competitors.
"We're different than Amazon. Amazon offers infrastructure, and they started in infrastructure. We're a differentiated intellectual property company. We make applications. We make platforms, databases, Java, business intelligence, analytics, machine-to-machine capability embedded in those applications," he said.
"I would guess a quarter of the world's infrastructure has a piece of Oracle IP running on top," said Hurd.
"We have more application offerings than anybody else. We're competing in more categories, franky the biggest categories...," Hurd, told CNBC. "For us it really is the bigger picture not just the competition in one segment," said Hurd.
The next direction for the company is investment in artificial intelligence. "We believe the application of AI, pattern matching, whatever word you want to use for the technology ... is really getting it integrated and embedded into the applications," said Hurd.
"Historically in our industry, we used to extract data from an application, send it somewhere, let people do magic with it ... and then send it back."
AI will not be a separate solution. It will be a feature integrated directly into applications, he said.
"And that's what we're delivering as we speak," he said.