On Tuesday, at Oracle's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, the database giant said that rather than being merely a "marketing application," social networking should serve as a fundamental technology for other cloud applications.

Taking an apparent dig at the vendors of social networking products - including vendors like Salesforce. com and its competitors -, Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison stressed in his keynote address at the conference that the social networking capabilities of the database company's Social Relationship Management Platform span across all its Fusion software-as-a-service applications.

About Oracle's Social Relationship Management technology, which now boasts the ability to collect and analyze substantial volumes of data, Ellison said that the most important aspect of the mentioned technology was that the company did not implement it as a suite of incoherent applications.

Noting that Oracle's social technology had been implemented at the "platform layer" instead of just the "application layer," Ellison said that the company's Social Relationship Management technology is thus "a platform -- it's not just a marketing application."

Further elaborating that "social" is embedded in Oracle's all Fusion apps, Ellison drew attention to the fact that each app developed using the Oracle technology "inherits the benefits of social technology," and said: "This is a big difference between us and other [vendors] in our approach to social."