Oracle OpenWorld: 'Mad as hell' Larry goes public with the Cloud

Round two, seconds out – here comes Larry Ellison and he’s mad as hell and all the better for it.

After being criticised for a lacklustre performance on Sunday at the Oracle OpenWorld keynote and ensuring the (self-inflicted) PR nightmare of Salesforce.com’s ousting from its keynote slot, the Oracle CEO came out fighting for the closing session at his own conference with a new public Cloud offering and a trashing of his upstart rivals.

The tone was set when the Oracle boss – who couldn’t even bring himself to say Cloud without a curl of the lips a few years ago – stole Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s anti-Oracle catchphrase and turned it back on him:

“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.”

Dismissing Salesforce.com as the “roach motel of Cloud services”, Ellison sneered that while Marc Benioff talks of his firm as being genuinely open, it is in fact:

“the ultimate vendor lock-in…you can check in but you can't check out…it’s like an airplane where you fly into the Cloud and you never get out. It's not a good thing.”

Don’t be fooled by Salesforce.com’s claims of openness based on the Heroku development language, he added:

“They say, 'Oh, we just bought Heroku. It runs Java.' It's sort of like a Salesforce.com version of Java that only runs in Heroku. Don't try to move that [Java Enterprise Edition] application to the Salesforce.com Cloud. It won't run. If you build something in Heroku you can't move it. It's a derivative of Java. ”

So now, Oracle is delivering its own Cloud - the Oracle Public Cloud, based upon Oracle’s Fusion Applications platform. Ellison quipped:

“When you need a Cloud, you just need a Cloud. Everyone has a Cloud. We need a Cloud. ”

The facts: The Oracle Public Cloud will combine Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service capabilities. Customers will be able to run Oracle Fusion applications, extensions to those applications and custom-build applications on the Oracle Public Cloud. It will offer a database service, a Java service for developers, a data service and a security service.

It will be available on a monthly subscription basis, has self-service sign up, instant provisioning, elastic capacity-on-demand, and the ability to extend cloud applications using Java.

And it will compete directly with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud – and Salesforce.com’s Force.com. In contrast to Salesforce.com, insisted Ellison, Oracle’s Cloud is open and highly portable. He said:

“Our Cloud's a little bit different. It's both platform as a service and applications as a service. The key part is that our Cloud is based on industry standards and supports full interoperability with other Clouds. Just because you go to the Cloud doesn't mean you forget everything about information technology from the past 20 years. ”

To that end:

“You can take any existing Oracle database you have and move it to our Cloud. You can just move it across and it runs unchanged. Oh by the way, you can move it back if you want to. You can move it to the Amazon Cloud if you want to. You can do development and test on our cloud and go into production in your data centre and nothing changes.”

He concluded:

“You have a choice, and I'm pro-choice. The guys at Salesforce.com are not pro-choice.”

But while Ellison may have come round to the cause of Cloud Computing – or rather, finally accepted the terminology for public use – his antipathy to multi-tenant architectures remains intact. He argued:

“That's a very bad security model. It was state of the art 15 years ago. This is 2011. All the modern compute clouds use virtualization as part of their security model. You get a separate virtual machine, your data's in a separate database because it's virtualized. They put your data at risk by co-mingling it with others.”

For his part, Benioff – who earlier described his increasingly fractious battle with former mentor Ellison as “just tennis” – took the latest rally in seemingly good part, posting on Twitter:

“You can't buy this type of advertising. Thank you Larry. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”