Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
(Credit: Dan Farber)"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
"We'll make cloud computing announcements. I'm not going to fight this thing. But I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud."
I led a panel at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference earlier this week on cloud computing with some of the leaders in the field: David P. Anderson, research scientist, University of California at Berkeley; Matthew Glotzbach, product management director, Google; Parker Harris, EVP, Technology, Salesforce.com; Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist and co-founder, VMware; and Werner Vogels, VP and CTO, Amazon.com. The group generally agreed that cloud computing involves software running off premises, but that there are different workloads and kinds of scenarios.
The problem is that every tech company now wants to be associated with cloud computing, no matter if their products and services meet the basic criteria. At least Ellison isn't afraid to address the hijacking of the phrase by marketers, including Oracle's.
Frank Gillett of Forrester speaks about the cloud envy of various companies who jump on the cloud computing bandwagon by rebranding existing services in this interview with Beet.TV.
On this week's EIC Squared podcast ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I talk about the gyrating, uncertain financial markets. Larry says that consolidation in the financial sector could result in an IT spending decline, but notes that Oracle's latest quarterly results were solid.
We also discuss the hacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account, and Web 2.0 reaching middle age.
This weekend I attended a book party in San Francisco for Jonathan Zittrain. His book, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, was recently published and received good reviews. I will be interviewing him at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society 10th anniversary conference on the future of the Internet this week.
At the party, I talked for a few minutes with Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison. The book party was hosted by Ellison's novelist wife, Melanie, and HuffPo's Arianna Huffington. It turns out that Zittrain and Melanie Ellison met in junior high school.
I asked Ellison about the growing market for on-demand software and about SAP's problems getting its on-demand enterprise application suite, Business ByDesign, to market. Ellison said that SAP's problems indicate how difficult it is to develop on-demand software.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
(Credit: Dan Farber)Ellison invested early on in two of the current on-demand software leaders, NetSuite and Salesforce.com. He is the majority stakeholder in NetSuite and owns a few percent of salesforce.com, both of which are public companies.
Ellison doesn't appear to be in a hurry to cash out or bring them into Oracle's orbit. It's been 10 years since NetSuite and Salesforce.com were founded, and there isn't a standalone billion-dollar on-demand software company, he told me. He noted that Oracle revenues are around $26 billion and said that Oracle has built the biggest on-demand software business.
The Oracle Web site claims 3.6 million users of hosted applications, middleware and database. However, if on-demand is more narrowly defined as multitenant, shared environments, Salesforce.com takes the enterprise software crown.
While the two companies are growing, and taking advantage of the heightened interest in on-demand software, neither company is the kind of profit engine that excites Ellison.
NetSuite lost $23.9 million on $108.5 million for 2007 (revenue did climb 62 percent), and Salesforce.com reported $748.7 million (a 51 percent increase from the previous year) in revenue and $18 million in net income for fiscal year 2008, which ended January 31. Salesforce.com is projecting that it will break the $1 billion revenue barrier for its current fiscal year.
Despite the large year-over-year revenue growth of his two investments, Ellison said that on-demand enterprise software is growing slowly, comparing it to how open-source software has evolved. It all depends on your point of view. Most people would agree that on-demand and open-source are gaining market share at the expense of the incumbents, especially among smaller businesses.
But Ellison is playing in a different league. He looks at MySQL, which Sun acquired, and doesn't see it eating his lunch. He looks at Salesforce.com and NetSuite with his parental, velociraptor eyes and doesn't see them as worth pursuing at this time. That may change down the road. Oracle has consumed most of its worthy competition from the old world, and it will get hungry again, especially if it wants to expand its market downstream from the large enterprises.
In this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss current events--Comcast and BitTorrent teaming up, Oracle's latest earnings, recent moves at Facebook, and Adobe Systems' introduction of Photoshop for the cloud.
For reference, here are links to some of the coverage:
BitTorrent president: Comcast agreement is a 'win'
Comcast and BitTorrent bury the hatchet
Oracle new license revenue triggers IT spending worries
Facebook goes hyper-viral with 'People You May Know'
Facebook ignores OpenSocial, embraces Windows Live Contacts API
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