Oracle’s Ellison Criticizes Salesforce

Always outspoken, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison addressed several topics in his OpenWorld keynote — including what he sees as the limitations of Salesforce’s approach.

SAN FRANCISCO — Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has at least two things in common with his close friend Steve Jobs: his new found love of integrated hardware and software systems, and a ready willingness to diss competitors.

Ellison displayed both attributes during his keynote address here late Wednesday afternoon at his company’s Oracle OpenWorld conference.

The colorful CEO pounded repeatedly on the message that with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is now able to offer well-engineered, integrated systems that give it a competitive edge.

“Sunday’s announcement of our Exalogic Elastic ‘cloud-in-a-box’ is our second major project of integrating our software with next-generation hardware,” Ellison said. “And it’s engineered the right way, to be more reliable, faster and more secure than other systems. It’s like the iPhone.”

Ellison also elaborated on critical remarks he made about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) during OpenWorld’s official kickoff Sunday.

Ellison said Salesforce would be well-advised to switch to Oracle’s latest Exadata servers for its fast-growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business. But he also claimed Salesforce, which has done more to popularize the SaaS computing paradigm than any other company, is based on a shaky foundation.

“Salesforce uses multi-tenancy and a lot of people say that’s what makes it a SaaS or cloud system,” said Ellison. “It’s a horrible idea. Multi-tenancy means every customer is in the same database — Siemens, GE … that’s a horrible security model. In the 21st century the technology we use is called virtualization. Multi-tenancy is 15 years old.”

Read the rest at CIO Update.