In his Wednesday afternoon address, Ellison also used a popular Benioff phrase--in which he criticizes Oracle’s hardware systems, warning "beware of false clouds"--against Benioff, citing Salesforce’s shortcomings. Salesforce apps are written in non-industry-standard languages such as APEX or Heroku, the latter being a company Salesforce acquired in 2010. That prevents them from being moved to another cloud or to the customer’s own premises.
In addition, Salesforce limits how much capacity each customer can use and cancels customer compute jobs that exceed that limit. Also, Salesforce commingles data of different customers in the same physical servers, which makes some customers uneasy. "That was state-of-the-art technology 15 years ago," Ellison said.
While the skirmish highlights the different philosophies of the companies, both approaches can be right, because even if a company chooses to get its IT only from the cloud, the compute cycles have to be generated somewhere. "As IT services move into the cloud, they still need hardware in the cloud on which to run," says Nathan Brookwood of the research firm Insight 64. "If Oracle hardware handles ‘cloud workloads’ better than other approaches, service providers will be motivated to deploy Oracle in the cloud."
In a news conference following his keynote, Benioff said he apologized to Ellison for comments he made online dissing Ellison’s Sunday night keynote. "In my world, this is just tennis. We hit the ball back and forth across the net. It’s not personal."
And Ellison gives as good as he gets. Last week, Oracle publicly embarrassed HP by claiming that the U.K. software company Autonomy was shopped to Oracle before it was acquired by HP, which HP has denied. Critics have said the $10.3 billion HP paid for Autonomy was more than it was worth. Ellison also criticized HP for forcing out Mark Hurd as CEO in 2010, then promptly hired Hurd as president of Oracle.
In promoting the way in which social media can change the way businesses operate, Benioff is fond of citing the reported influence of social media in helping to organize the Arab Spring protests earlier this year in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, among other countries, against what he called "oppressive regimes." Benioff said, "I didn’t realize I would find one here at Oracle Open World."
See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Strategy: Cloud SLAs (subscription required).
