Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said in an interview with CNBC that he’ll use the company’s cash to boost dividends gradually over time, rather than to make big acquisitions.

Ellison, speaking at the Oracle’s OpenWorld conference, said Tuesday that he’s focused on growing its cloud computing products that deliver software and computing services over the Internet. The company has spent more than $50 billion on more than 80 deals, mainly to add business programs that manage corporate finances and operations. It had $31.6 billion in cash at the end of the fiscal first quarter.

“We could do a big deal again down the road,” Ellison said in an interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo. “Over the next couple of years, senior management down to individual programmers and sales people are focused on one thing: selling applications in the cloud, selling our platform in the cloud and selling our infrastructure in the cloud.”

Hawaiian Island Vision

For the first time publicly, Ellison also talked about his plans for the Hawaiian island he bought from fellow billionaire David Murdock in June. (Murdock founded the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, N.C.)

Ellison envisions Lanai as becoming a “little laboratory” for experimenting with more environmentally sound ways to live.

Ellison’s ambitions include converting sea water into fresh water on the 141-square-mile island. He also wants to see more electric cars on the island located near Maui, and hopes to increase its fruit exports to Japan and other markets.

Oracle’s success has minted Ellison an estimated fortune of $41 billion. He bought 98 percent of Lanai from Murdock in June for an undisclosed price. The Maui News reported that Murdock, the CEO of Castle & Cooke Inc., was seeking $500 million to $600 million for his Lanai holdings.

Ellison hadn’t publicly shared his vision for Lanai until Tuesday’s interview. The silence had left Lanai’s roughly 3,200 residents wondering whether their lives would be disrupted under Ellison’s ownership.

In Tuesday’s interview, Ellison said he intends to “support the local people.”

Ellison’s Lanai holdings include two resorts, two golf courses and assorted commercial and residential buildings. Three utilities on the island also are under Ellison’s control

Lanai is just one piece of Ellison’s sprawling real-estate portfolio. He also owns estates or mansions in San Francisco, Lake Tahoe and southern California, as well as in Newport, R.I. and Japan. He told CNBC Tuesday that he plans to convert some of the homes into art museums and traced his interest in fancy homes to his childhood dream of being an architect.

Platform Software

On Sunday, Ellison unveiled a high-end server with more memory and the first update of its flagship database in five years. He’s betting those new products and a shift to cloud services will boost sales. Oracle’s share price has underperformed SAP AG and Salesforce.com Inc., its rivals in providing cloud computing for businesses.

Oracle’s cloud computing software can save customers time and money because of its strengths in many facets of the software market, Ellison said.

“You have to consider not only the application you’re buying but also the platform on which it rests,” Ellison said in an address at the conference. “You still have to hook up that application to other applications.”

Oracle is competing in the business-applications market by touting its advantage in platform software — its market-leading database and middleware built with the widely used Java programming language. Ellison argued that buying from one supplier for all of that software can save customers the work of stitching together software from Salesforce and Workday Inc. with systems they already run.

“Just because it’s in the cloud doesn’t mean we never do anything technical again,” Ellison said.

Shares of Redwood City, California-based Oracle declined less than 1 percent to $31.65 at the close in New York. The shares have gained 23 percent this year, compared with a 21 percent increase in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Information Technology Sector Index. 

(The AP and Bloomberg contributed to this report.)