Salesforce Boss Benioff Beats Larry Ellison at Own Game

On a higher level, the incident highlights the battle between the "cloud computing" movement and the entrenched hardware and software businesses of the traditional enterprise IT players. Benioff is a cloud-computing poster child, using the net to offer both applications and entire software platforms for building and hosting your own applications, during Ellison is intent on pushing not only Oracle's traditional software, nevertheless also a new breed of hardware appliances designed to run that software.

The cloud computing movement

Ellison is now being publicly dismissive of the cloud computing movement, and although he has for the time being acknowledged the existence of the cloud in recent months, he insists that underneath it all, the cloud is just good old fashioned hardware and software. After all is said and done year's OpenWorld, he pointed to one of Oracle's hardware appliances and said: "This is my cloud."

Like Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Benioff takes exception to traditional IT giants co-opting the cloud moniker for hardware and software setup inside your local data center. A cloud, he says, is an online service that anyone can use, a shared virtual infrastructure that "democratizes" business research.

He as well apologized to Ellison, after a fashion. "My mother is upset with me for pissing off Larry," he said, "so I apologize to her and to Larry." But at that time he spent much of the then and there hour decrying Oracle's business. “My message is not one of proprietary mainframes,” he said. “This is a message of openness.”