Oracle's outspoken chief executive officer believes the company needs its own operating system to match the competition, and has admitted he considered buying Suse Linux owner, Novell.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Larry Ellison said that Oracle needs to own an operating system in order to fully compete with rivals Microsoft and IBM.

"We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux," said Ellison in an interview with the UK-based paper.

Ellison admitted that the company has looked into acquiring Novell, which owns Suse Linux -- the second most popular Linux distribution after Red Hat. However, he did not reveal any details about a potential agreement.

Ellison also said that Red Hat poses a different kind of threat now the company has acquired JBoss, which competes with Oracle and was one point rumoured to be an acquisition target for the database giant,

"Now that Red Hat... competes with us in middleware, we have to re-look at the relationship -- so does IBM... I don't think Oracle and IBM want another Microsoft in Red Hat," Ellison said.

In February, Oracle tried but failed to acquire open-source database maker MySQL.