Larry Ellison vs Marc Benioff: So what is Cloud Computing?

This summer at the Cloudforce conference Salesforce boss Marc Benioff showed the slide titled "Beware of the False Cloud! " with the picture of Oracle Exadata - storage appliance, that is used to build private clouds. Benioff said: "The false Cloud isn’t efficient. It’s not economical. It’s not democratic, it’s not the same for small medium and large companies. It doesn’t have low CO2 emissions. It’s a false cloud and they are just marketing the name because we’re doing so well". And yesterday, at the presentation of the new out-of-the-box private cloud solution Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Larry Ellison also spent five minutes of humor, devoted to his former employee Marc Benioff. Here's the video:



Larry said, "He (Benioff) says: - we are Cloud Computing. But Salesforce.com is really one or two applications on the internet. It's a sales force application and a service application, but it's really not a platform. It has a limited proprietary platform. Hundred of customers co-mingle their data in the same database – it's a very weak security model. It's not secure. It's not elastic. If demand increases on Salesforce.com, you better reduce demand. People go around reducing the reports and the data level because they can't dynamically add new virtual machines. It's priced not on usage, but per users. The whole idea of Cloud Computing is to have a pool of applications that share resources. A Cloud is a platform. It's elastic. It can be public or private. It runs all of your applications. It's built on standards."

It's a definition that some will agree with and some will not. But perhaps everyone can at least agree that his definition is at least better than arguing that Clouds are just "water vapour as Ellison has done in frustration in the past...



By the way, the new Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is a platform for building million dollar private clouds, which includes Oracle Exalogic servers with an overall capacity up to 360 64-bit Xeon processors, storage system Oracle Exadata Database Machine, software (OS, middleware, virtual machine) and network equipment. The platform is optimized for Java-based applications and in particular, for Oracle's enterprise systems. So as Oracle promised, having acquired Sun - now they can deliver super-optimized solutions, which include hardware, system software and business applications.

See also: Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms