Here’s a video of Mr. Oracle mocking cloud. He’s right about the industry jargon nonsense…the flavor of the month was On-demand, then SaaS, then Cloud, and who knows what’s next pure Web-based technology. But he’s missing that fact that it’s not just hardware and applications. What about the evolution of delivering specialized, integrated partner networks along with the applications in the cloud? You know, the thing YOU MUST HAVE to support various inter-company business processes?
Sure, Oracle will build a network for you, but at what cost? If you read the comment posts below the video, you get a sense of the market’s confusion. One person says “Sounds just like Ken Olsen, CEO of Digital, who continually debunked the PC,” while another says “The first time I used ‘cloud computing’ was with an IBM 360 and 2260 dumb terminal, around 1969 I believe. Nothing new here that I can see…”
Lastly, for all the mocking of Salesforce.com, he keeps talking about them. Oracle’s on-demand strategy came up recently during the Oracle earnings call. It will not be easy for Oracle to change, so if cloud/SaaS/on-demand keeps marching its way into the IT world, they may be in for a rough ride.
[...] Larry Ellison had a famous video interview where he was poking fun at cloud and laughing about it. You can see my blog post about it here. Well, at Oracle Open World a few weeks ago, Mr. Ellison was on stage…announcing the Oracle [...]