OpenWorld: Benioff undermines Oracle with covert keynote

Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff issued a scathing assessment of Oracle today following the cancellation of his planned keynote address at OpenWorld.

Salesforce scheduled a hastily organised presentation on Wednesday at the St Regis hotel in San Francisco less than 20 hours after Benioff said that Oracle had cancelled his original presentation.

The Salesforce founder and chief executive accused Oracle of cancelling his keynote out of fear of the advance of cloud computing, which Benioff believes will undermine Oracle's proprietary hardware and software businesses.

"This is a social revolution and it is not just about the consumer, it is about the enterprise. But is that what we are hearing at this conference?" Benioff asked.

"I suggest to you that it is a contrarian position that caused the cancellation of this keynote."

Benioff claimed that Oracle had offered to reschedule the keynote for Thursday, but that he had already planned to travel to another conference in Ohio.

Instead, Benioff enlisted a combination of Salesforce's Chatter service and Facebook account to mobilise employees and set up the impromptu conference at the St Regis, blocks away from the OpenWorld event at the Moscone Center.

"We said yes, we can do it. It does not matter what Oracle thinks. We can create it," he said.

Benioff used the incident as an example of what he believes is a changing enterprise IT space in which Oracle is ill-equipped to compete.

He suggested that the emergence of cloud computing platforms and open systems will push customers away from the converged platforms which Oracle has highlighted at this year's OpenWorld.

"The conference message is that you have to buy a proprietary mainframe to do it. That is not empowering, that is not enabling and that does not create growth. That is why Oracle has only sold 1,000 computers," he said.