Ellison and Benioff…the battle moves to the cloud!

Back in the days of the bubble, it was fun to watch Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com and Larry Ellison of Oracle battle over clients, software and quite frankly everything!  Well, the measuring contest continued yesterday when Larry Ellison revealed an assortment of public cloud computing services at the Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco.  As an ode to the dot.com bubble days, Ellison slammed Benioff and Salesforce.com by calling them the “roach motel” of public cloud services!

Ellison continued to castigate Salesforce.com along with competitor SAP, by emphasizing the importance of using industry-standard languages like Java.  Salesforce’s and SAP’s clouds run on custom languages like APEX and “proprietary” technologies that prevent businesses from developing apps in an on premise data center.  “You can do development and test on our cloud and go into production in your data center … and nothing changes. Everything is portable. Your data is portable,” Ellison gushed.

This is a huge boon for the Oracle public cloud service!  Basically it means that unlike Salesforce.com and SAP, the Oracle public cloud will play nice with Amazon’s cloud and any other cloud environments that do not have a “proprietary” technology requirement.  According to Ellison, the Salesforce.com cloud has created  a vendor lock-in that prevents customers from leaving Salesforce.com’s cloud because their applications are not compatible with other cloud environments in the market.  This is the argument that prompted Ellison to refer to Benioff and the Salesforce.com cloud as “the roach motel of clouds”.

Ellison continued his tirade against Benioff and the Salesforce.com cloud and had me reminiscing about the good ol’ dot.com era…oh how I love these two tech characters!  It is good to see that they still have it in them!  Over the years the technology environment  has become quite mundane, so Benioff and Ellison’s antics provide a well needed laugh.  Thank you gentlemen (read, media whore) for moving the fun to the cloud…where else!