Larry Ellison Oracle's founder, ex-CEO and CTO (although, one suspects he makes essentially all the decisions still) is perhaps the most entertaining technology executive in the world. From owning his island to funding America's Cup challenges. From his bizarre ability to never age to his frequent arguments about his private pilot antics, hardly a week goes by without Ellison making his way into journalists' workbooks.
One of the more interesting ongoing stories has been Ellison's relationship with others executives in the technology industry. The hostile takeover of PeopleSoft by Oracle gave commentators much to chew over, but certainly didn't make Ellison any friends. But one suspects that making friends isn't top on the list of Ellison's priorities.
That would seem to have been the case at the recent end-of-quarter analyst call from Oracle. Despite nominally being the CTO and hence not of much relevance to the analyst call, Ellison has much to say about his company and, more importantly, competitors.
There is some context in all of this: his two targets were Workday and Salesforce. Workday, the fast growing human resources and ERP vendor, was founded by Aneel Bhusri and David Duffield. These two battled to keep PeopleSoft independent from Oracle - those two have no love for Ellison and Workday has long been a target.
Salesforce, however, is less clear-cut. Marc Benioff, Salesforce's founder and CEO, is an ex-deputy of Ellison's and cut his teeth at Oracle - many suggest that Benioff will eventually be the man to head up Oracle when Ellison finally retires. Until then, there are many battles to fight it seems.
In Oracle's press release talking about quarterly performance, Ellison took a swipe at Salesforce and backed it up on the call making some bold claims about the two companies' relative market share:
I now believe that Oracle will sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than Salesforce.com in this current calendar year, 2015. It’s going to be close, but I think we’re going to sell more in the cloud than they do this year.
I suspect that might come as a big surprise to a lot of people out there. You won’t have to wait very long to find out who’s going to win this.
Not happy to simply battle one vendor, Ellison was also keen to critique the model of Workday. Ellison claimed that Oracle picked up more ERP customers in this quarter than Workday has in its entire life. This is a somewhat unfair statement since Workday has only recently begun entering the true ERP space and isn't a comparable vendor. Ellison went on to criticize Workday's technology saying:
We think we put multi-tenancy at the right level of the stack in the database rather than multi-tenancy in the application. We think we have a huge advantage over someone like Workday that doesn’t have a database.
Workday kind of built their own little database. And that’s what you’re buying into when you buy Workday. We built our own little database. It’s called Oracle. Workday has its own programming technology. We haven’t. We used this programming technology called Java.
We built everything, everything from scratch. Every single line of code in Fusion HCM is new for the cloud every single line of code where Fusion ERP is new for the cloud. And those new cloud applications are based on by far the strongest platform. Workday doesn’t even have a platform that they sell. They have no platform. They have the platform that they kind of use internally.
I’ll give you an example of how strong our Cloud platform is. Salesforce.com uses our Cloud platform. NetSuite uses our Cloud platform. In fact, every single cloud company of size, the top 10, nine of them use our database in the Cloud. Workday is the only one that doesn’t. But tell me again the advantages they think they have?
MyPOV
For pure entertainment, you can't beat Ellison. Regardless of whether or not his claims are correct, they're certainly articulated in an engaging manner.
The truth is that Ellison wouldn't be wasting his time on them if Salesforce and Workday weren't either competitor now or had the potential to be in the future. As Oracle moves into a cloudy world and has to compete with subscription vendors, and as the ability to lock customers into one platform reduces, Oracle needs to look at these companies as threats.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had with someone the other day. That person, a long-term industry veteran was open about the fact that he has never talked to an enterprise that wanted to keep paying Oracle license fees. Oracle would see to be a hated vendor that no one can do without. Having your customers hold you in such low regard is always risky since changes in technology reduce your ability to bind them to your platform. With no technological reasons to stay on-platform, the lack of business ones to do so becomes more obvious.
What this means for Oracle's future is unclear - it could very well mean that the headlines of next year are already being written in terms of a hostile takeover of Workday or Salesforce by Oracle. Indeed many conspiracy theorists already believe the deal has been discussed and resolved by Ellison and Benioff and that all of this theatre is just simply market manipulation.
Time will tell the eventual outcome for all three fo these players but one thing is sure, it's not nearly as simple as Ellison would liek to suggest.
