Oracle Takes a Swing at Salesforce.com
Since its inception, Salesforce.com has been an absolute monster in the sales force automation and CRM markets, and has been acknowledged as the cloud computing giant.
At this week’s Oracle OpenWorld conference, CEO Larry Ellison threw some hard punches specifically aimed at Salesforce.com. Ellison began speaking about cloud computing, and how several vendors were re-branding old technology. He took a major swing at Salesforce.com by saying that their product offerings were really just Software as a Service (SaaS), and that the technology was outdated and not cloud computing.
Oracle CEO Ellison defined cloud computing by saying, “The cloud is a standards-based application, development and execution platform that includes hardware and software, is virtualized and elastic, and runs many apps. It can run on both public and private clouds.”
Ellison used the Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) to further define the cloud. He stated that on the Amazon cloud, users are able to build any apps because it is virtual and based on open standards, and it works with various platforms such as Linux, Java, Oracle, and MySQL. He went on to continue, “Salesforce.com is merely one or two apps running over the internet. It isn’t virtualized, is proprietary and has weak security.”
Larry Ellison’s onslaught of Salesforce.com continued as he explained that a true cloud application is able to scale up down in pace with demand, and is priced by what is used, unlike Salesforce.com’s licensing model, which is priced per number of users.
His rant finally came to a close as he pointed out that the solution for sales force automation is Oracle’s new Exalogic Elastic Cloud, which provides a unique cloud-in-a-box architecture that will help organizations deploy cloud CRM. The new Oracle cloud contains the new Oracle Fusion applications that include CRM modules, and the various tools of Oracle’s Exalogic provide a single solution that is supported by one central data warehouse.
[Photo courtesy of misskatecuttables.]
