Oracle CEO Preps Cloud Services
By JOHN LETZINGMay 30, 2012
RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif.—Oracle Corp. ORCL -1.10% Chief Executive Larry Ellison said Wednesday the business software giant will release an extensive collection of tools based on the Internet "cloud" in about a week, as the company strives to maintain its edge.
"We have all our applications in the cloud, starting June 6th," Mr. Ellison said during an appearance at the D: All Things Digital conference near Los Angeles, adding that he may publish his first tweet to mark the occasion.
The company has inspired a number of younger rivals that chose to deliver software as a service using the Internet, a model these days called cloud computing.
Though Oracle is sometimes characterized as a laggard in such services, Mr. Ellison was quick to take credit as seeing the potential for such offerings in the mid-1990s. One early example was NetSuite Inc., where he remains the largest shareholder with about 45% of its stock.
"NetSuite was my idea," Mr. Ellison said.
Another company, Salesforce.com Inc., CRM -3.25% was started after Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff—a onetime Ellison protégé at Oracle—"kind of copied" NetSuite, Mr. Ellison claimed, to laughter.
Mr. Ellison said Oracle's new cloud-based offerings were built using a design that breaks away from the model used by companies such as Salesforce.com. That approach, called "multitenancy," combines services for multiple companies on the same server.
One problem with multitenancy, Mr. Ellison said, is that customers find themselves on new versions of the underlying software when their supplier wants to, not when they do. Oracle's approach gives each customer what the industry calls a virtual machine, allowing them to upgrade when they want.
"We have a much more modern version of the cloud," Mr. Ellison says.
In an interview, the Oracle CEO said he continues to run engineering at Oracle because "I don't know what I'd do if I retired," acknowledging that much of what drives him is the desire to compete.
That has helped establish a roguish reputation for the CEO, who seems to have fun with the image. Sometimes, during meetings, Mr. Ellison said people will tell him he has defied their expectations—perhaps because "I didn't bite the head off a small animal," he suggested.
Mr. Ellison, as is often the case at public appearances, mocked rivals such asInternational Business Machines Corp. IBM -0.98% and Hewlett-Packard Co.HPQ -0.26% —and particularly H-P's former CEO Leo Apotheker, whom Mr. Ellison at times insisted on using with the American pronunciation, like "lee-o," rather than the more European "layo."
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