Thank heavens for Larry Ellison. Without the smack-talking Oracle (ORCL) co-founder and chief executive officer, the $1 trillion-a-year enterprise computing market would merely be huge, crucialâ??and boring. Oracle and fellow tech titans like IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Cisco Systems (CSCO) make the technology that runs major corporations around the world. But the intricacies of their products can put regular folks to sleep faster than a Senate hearing on Net neutrality.
After what seemed like an uneventful interregnum in which Ellison kept his swipes largely to himself, the rabble-rouser of Redwood Shores, Calif., is acting out once more. In the past two months alone, Ellison compared the HP board to "idiots" for firing Mark Hurd, hired Hurd, then again ridiculed HP's directors when they brought in a new CEO. In an e-mail to The Wall Street Journal, Ellison called the selection of former SAP (SAP) chief Léo Apotheker "madness" and said HP's whole board should resign. He even made fun of SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner's "wild Einstein hair." (Although, to be fair, Plattner did moon Ellison years ago during a sailboat race.) The Oracle chief "basically says to all players, 'I am your enemy,' " says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com (CRM) and a former Oracle executive, who himself has been the target of several Ellisonian barbs over the past few weeks.
Ellison's oratory is more than just entertaining Silicon Valley street theaterâ??it also speaks to increased competitive tensions in the enterprise computing business. The IT arena these days is a little like a game of bumper cars, with big companies in once-adjacent sectors of the industry now relentlessly colliding. Hardware makers such as Dell (DELL) and HP are getting into software, and software companies like Oracle are getting into hardware. The goal is to be able to sell software in tandem with computer hardware and help corporate customers tackle complex tasks like managing global shipments of components or gleaning new insights from data.
"We had 15 years of relative peace where everyone had their own patches and you had all these wonderful camps and coalitions," says James Alexander, senior vice-president of Info-Tech Research Group. "Now these guys need to keep driving top-line revenues and market share, and the only way to do that is through acquisitions and getting into somebody else's business."
Ellison, the world's sixth-richest man, wears his corporate strategy on the sleeves of his tailored Italian suits. Think of his colorful outbursts as a map of Oracle's ambitions. Next year, Oracle plans to deliver a suite of business applications called Fusion to replace an aging collection of software it owns from acquisitions of PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and other companies. That will put Oracle into closer competition with Salesforce.com, whose online software helps companies manage customer relationships over the Web. Thus, the Benioff-bashing. During his keynote at the annual OpenWorld conference for customers last month, Ellison slapped up a slide that digitally altered the title of Benioff's 2009 book, Behind the Cloud, to read Way Behind the Cloud. Benioff says he has some admiration for his former boss's tactics.
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