Back in 2009, Oracle CEO 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 cloud product. Not to be outdone, Marc Benioff pulled a PR move where he announced a keynote speech at Open World and then issued a second Press Release the very same day saying Oracle had pulled his slot at the last minute.
While Ellison is clearly saying his version of cloud is not multi-tenant (and thus more secure), Benioff calls that “False Cloud” because multi-tenancy is the core of the cloud value proposition and that “private” cloud solutions put behind a firewall, on a stack of Oracle hardware, is good for Oracle shareholders, but not the customer.
I tend to agree with Mr. Benioff on this one. The enterprise software vendors are in trouble because it will be very hard to move all customers onto a single, multi-tenant stack unless they did it from day one, like in the case of Salesforce.com.
It should also be interesting to see what Oracle does with Rightnow, a CRM competitor to Salesforece.com that Oracle just bought. I’m fairly certain they are a mutli-tenant cloud solution.
