Ellison to Benioff: That's your Cloud is False Cloud

A year ago at Oracle's OpenWorld conference the Salesforce CEO, Mark Benioff, took the stage to criticize Oracle's cloud technologies. He said that clouds can't be sold in metalic boxes, and in fact - these are false cloud, and everyone should beware of them. And thought the Oracle's boss, Larry Ellison, joked back then, but the offense remained in his mind. This year, he decided to revenge. First, he unexpectedly canceled the scheduled and paid Benioff's session at the OpenWorld. Of course, this didn't scare Benioff - he immediately organized the alternative session in the restaurant across the street. And, of course, the main topic of his speech was Oracle's false cloud, and near the restaurant people were walking with banners "The Cloud Must Go On".



But it was only the first round. The next day, Larry Ellison introduced the Oracle Public Cloud - the cloud service that is a direct competitor to Salesforce. It provides PaaS platform and the suite of SaaS applications (including CRM and social network).



Larry began his speech with: “Famous quote — I’m not sure where I’ve heard it – beware of false Clouds. That is such good advice. I couldn’t have put it better myself.” And then he told that unlike Salesforce's false cloud (which uses proprietary programming language APEX and database), in Oracle Public Cloud - everything is standard-based. Any Oracle-database can be moved to this cloud or back to in-house data-center, and any Java application will work in this cloud. And that unlike Salesforce's unsecure multitenant-model (where a single application serves many clients) in Oracle Public Cloud for each client a separate virtual machine with a separate database is created. And unlike the Salesforce's false cloud, Oracle Public Cloud can be really scaled to the changing load.



Regarding the SaaS applications - these are the legendary Fusion Applications, which had been under development already for six years. In particular, they include CRM system, HRM system and enterprise social network Oracle Public Cloud (which is very similar to Salesforce Chatter).



However, the trick is that the new platform and applications have been shown only on the presentation slides, at the end of the conference (to avoid questions). And it's not clear when they will become available.

And of course you want to know how Marc Benioff reacted to all this. He wrote in his Twitter: "Thank you Larry. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

See also: Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms