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Storm clouds were gathering over San Francisco's Moscone Centre on Tuesday – literally and metaphorically. In the literal sense, the city by the bay was at the centre of a mighty downpour as the rather soggy queue of people winding around the block could testify. In the metaphorical sense, the storm clouds were anticipated as Salesforce.com hosted what was tantamount to a fringe meeting in a theatre next to the Oracle OpenWorld conference venue.

This was Daniel in the lions den. Nixon going to China. The clash of the titans. An exaggeration? Perhaps a bit, but there's little doubt that the prospect of Salesforce.com Marc Benioff parking his tanks on Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's lawn brought a frisson of excitement to Day Three of OpenWorld.

It's not that Benioff and Ellison don't get on. In fact Benioff regularly pays tribute to Ellison as one of his mentors and a major influence on his outlook. Ellison was also an initial investor in Salesforce.com. But as has been noted increasingly regularly, Ellison has a big issue with the term Cloud Computing, a frustration which spilled over at a recent Oracle shareholder meeting.

Asked about Salesforce.com, the Oracle boss launched into a no-holds barred stream of consciousness. “Let’s look at their technology” he declared. “They buy computers. They rent a room. Uh, they put the computers in the room. They buy electricity and plug it in. They then buy an Oracle database to run on those computers and then they buy Oracle middleware to build their applications. Oh, excuse me, and then they build this little itty-bitty application for salesforce automation.”

Ouch! But Ellison wasn't done just yet. “Most of the technology at Salesforce.com is ours,” he went on. “We think Salesforce.com has got terrific underlying technology…In fact, everything they run is on an Oracle database. We think the Oracle database is fabulous Cloud technology. But they don’t stop there. On top of the Oracle database they build their applications using — what is it? Oracle middleware. Oh, my God.”

Parking the tanks

But for all that, Oracle allowed Salesforce.com to sponsor OpenWorld, have a large exhibition stand on the show floor and let Benioff host his own executive solutions session on the subject of 'The Best of Both Worlds”. For his part, Benioff made the requisite complimentary remarks as he opened his session. "We asked for clouds at OpenWorld but this was beyond expectations,” he joked as he looked out at the damp audience. “We have tremendous history with Oracle. Larry was our first investor. They have been a great supplier.”

With that done, Benioff set out his stall for Cloud Computing, pitching a Cloud 101 message to an audience that came to OpenWorld to be told a rather different story by the host company. Oracle has a multi-tenant SaaS offering in the shape of Oracle CRM On Demand, but also offers on premises versions of CRM.

The existence of two worlds needn't be an issue, said Benioff.  “A lot of our customers use Oracle producsts, the Oracle database, Oracle financials, as we do. But they can also find benefit in Cloud Computing. We understand that there are lots of companies who are using Oracle and Salesforce.com and we want to bring those worlds together.”

One such joint Salseforce.com/Oracle customer is Dell Computer which does itself have serious Cloud ambitions as well as being one of Salesforce.com's biggest customers. It's also one of Oracle's biggest customers as CEO Michael Dell himself had testified when he had shared a stage with Ellison an hour earlier.  “We want to power the Clouds,” explained Dell. “Whether it's Salesforce.com or Amazon or Facebook, they're all powered by Dell. I've got four kids. One of my kids uses Facebook. The more people who use Facebook the more Dell servers they buy. I like that.”

EMC's CIO Sanjay Mirchandani questioned the need for an 'us or them' view of the world. “We are an Oracle customer and we've been a Salesforce.com customer since May of last year,” he said. “The learnings we've had is it's not an either or issue. We look at agility and nimbleness. We wanted to take the best of the knowledge in our Oracle systems and add it to what Salesforce.com can bring.”

Old stomping grounds

For his part, Benioff recalled that he had stood on the same stage before during his time at Oracle, although today was a rather different experience he said. “When I used to be talking to audiences at OpenWorld I used to feel a bit guilty that I was really only talking to the largest customers,” he said. “Cloud Computing is democratic, a new type of business model. It's not just for the largest companies.”

To demonstrate Salesforce.com's offerings in practice, Benioff turned to the latest big push from the firm – the Service Cloud 2. “Its not all about the contact centre anymore,” he said. “We go to Google for answers, trying to find another user to help us. We go to Facebook – I do that. Or I can go to Twitter and get a massive response or search Twitter. What if you could integrate all this. What if the call centre, email, community mangement, the social networks and custom applications were all running to give us a next generation experience. The reason I wanted to show you the Service Cloud  is that I believe it's an exact and perfect example of what we all need to build for our users.”

And with that it was almost over. All that remains was a stroll through the rain to the Oracle OpenWorld exhibition floor where the massive Salesforce.com stand was never going to be missed, even before the CEO sat down on it and started signing a few copies of his new book. 

So, it wasn't the Benioff v Ellison rumble that some had hoped for, although this was always going to be a vain expectation.  And Ellison isn't likely to be any more Cloud Computing enthused during his closing keynote on Day Four of the conference. But it's impossible to escape the conclusion that even if Benioff's tanks weren't there to fire in anger at the enemy, the packed house at the presentation – and the willingness of Oracle conference goers to stand in the rain for half an hour to get in – suggests that next year they might need a bigger venue. Maybe a slot on the keynote stage even? Larry? Over to you...