Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff decided to start one of those pissing matches tech is famous for by calling Oracle's cloud offerings a “false cloud” at his latest corporate conference.
Benioff, who looks a bit like former Borland CEO Philippe Kahn circa 1988, has a lot in common with the man. He's a salesman, a showman. He's about sizzle. When he takes the stage, it's to entertain, inspire, and provoke. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
He has some good points. Virtualization, by itself, is not a cloud. Software, even running on a server, is not a cloud. Running enterprise applications, even if you have a cloud stack installed somewhere, is not a cloud.
A cloud is a cloud.
A cloud combines virtualization, distributed computing, and a full cloud infrastructure platform, resulting in services that operate at scale in real time. Everything else is just pieces.
Until you have a cloud, and it's running your applications, in other words, no cloud. Just cloud talk – fog in other words.
Oracle is Benioff's target because Oracle is easy to hate. But his point is aimed at the whole enterprise space, which right now thinks it can “embrace and extend” into the cloud by simply picking up some cloud capabilities or selling parts.
At the same time, enterprise applications can't be rewritten for the cloud all at once. It's not simple. Not as simple as Benioff makes it out to be. You can't just do transaction processing, for instance, in a cloud – there are too many variables involved.
So you have both a cheap shot and a sales pitch, wrapped up in a spitwad and shot, through the straw of the press, at the neck of the most powerful executive in tech.
Fun, but not useful.
If Benioff wanted to be useful, he could have promised at least a time line for building tools that will take enterprise applications to the cloud, or that will help companies prioritize what they're doing and decide which to take to the cloud first. That's why enterprises like what they're hearing from the tool makers, even though it's bull-hockey – it's their upgrade path. To them, Benioff comes off as a hectoring bully, a SaaS guy acting sassy.
But boy did the press eat it up. And when the tech is eating sizzle while ignoring steak, we have problems.
