'Is there anything left?" A question posed by a journalist to an Oracle executive this week during a briefing at Oracle's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco drew laughter. The query came after the executive had outlined the company's new software releases, which included 183 new "software as a service" modules (SaaS, or software offered via the cloud as a service rather than as a boxed product).

What the questioner meant was, can there be any segment of business left where Oracle doesn’t have a software or service offering?

A lot of people are wondering the same thing about Oracle, which has become one of the world’s largest technology one-stop shops for just about anything you need to run a medium to large organisation.

Oracle started as a database company. After years of aggressive acquisitions, the company is huge, with more than 130,000 employees – its Indian operations alone have 25,000.

One Oracle employee said the company often makes acquisitions now on the basis that many Oracle customers also using the target company’s products noted it would be more convenient if Oracle bought the company and integrated the products.

Oracle’s product list has ballooned to include a vast array of software and cloud services and extends to hardware and even microchips, thanks to its acquisition of Sun. And, as the questioner noted, it seems as if Oracle now has an application for every field – finance, data science, communications, education, hospitality, public sector, retail, utilities, health, you name it.

Many industry observers thought Oracle would fracture under its own weight as it ingested all its acquisition and had to integrate product lines, thousands of employees, and different corporate cultures. But it didn’t. Just the opposite. It keeps motoring along, often with impressive financial results.

Former HP boss Mark Hurd, one of two chief executives at Oracle (with Safra Catz), was bullish about the future when meeting the press during the week. "Our revenue rate is increasing as we get bigger," he boasted.

A major growth area for the company is in its broad cloud computing offering, where hardware and software is sold as a service accessed over the internet. Alongside SaaS, Oracle cloud services also include PaaS (platform as a service, a virtual computing environment for developing and running applications) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service, essentially, a virtual data centre).

In September, the company reported its PaaS and SaaS revenue was up 34 per cent in the last quarter and IaaS up 16 per cent. Hurd added that the company planned to double SaaS and PaaS cloud margins over the next two years. Oracle’s cloud revenue run rate was $2.4 billion, he said.

All of which is impressive, but the revenue issue is tricky. Cloud margins overall tend to be much lower than those that come from selling traditional boxed software and revenue is seen as less predictable than with software purchases.

But then, there’s the argument that a tech company such as Oracle has little choice but to offer cloud services even if they cut into traditional revenue. From that point of view, Oracle made a shrewd bet starting about a decade ago that this new services model would keep growing and that the company would need to be in that market or ossify.

Some of Oracle's competitors, such as IBM, came more slowly to the realisation that they needed to be in the cloud and are suffering as a result, with revenue stalling as they reconfigure their businesses around the cloud. Company founder Larry Ellison, now Oracle's executive chairman and chief technology officer (having handed over the chief executive role to Hurd and Catz), emphasised during his two OpenWorld keynotes that only Microsoft stands as a rival across all three areas of the cloud.

But Oracle still has a significant lead and also that formidably broad product range. Hurd and Ellison said they expected the cloud market to consolidate into two major players, with one dominating – both implying, probably rightly, that the biggest player would be Oracle itself.

One has to hope the market remains more diverse and competitive than this, though. Technology history indicates that when one company becomes overwhelmingly dominant, prices harden and innovation inevitably slows. There should always be something left.