Global CIO: Oracle Launches 'Cloud In A Box' And New Cloud Business

"Salesforce.com—it's really just one or two applications on the Internet," Ellison said in reference to the company with which he often seems to have a love/hate relationship. "It's really just a salesforce-automation on the cloud—SaaS apps with a very limited platform. And it's not virtualized—in fact, it's just the opposite."

Ellison then escalated the attack, saying that with Salesforce.com's multitenant model, "hundreds or thousands of customers commingle their data with using the Salesforce.com apps—you've got GE with its data mixed in with Siemens and its data—it's really a very weak security model."

He said the Salesforce.com SaaS model also offers no fault isolation, meaning that "one system failure brings down many customers."

Conversely, Ellison praised the elasticity of the Amazon approach and said Oracle's Exalogic is built on the same premises.

For lots of details on the new Oracle Exalogic system, click here.

The strategic importance of the new system lies in Oracle's intensified commitment to highly optimized and engineered systems that deliver the higher performance demanded by today's high-volume, high-velocity global economy while also removing from customers the need for extensive integration, tuning, testing, modifying, and the like.

On top of that, the company's new Cloud Service business reaffirms a fundamental Oracle strategy to help customers deploy applications in public clouds, private clouds, or hybrid environments. And it puts to rest any notion that Larry Ellison is hostile to cloud computing.

At the beginning of his talk, Ellison said of cloud computing, "The term has been used to describe so many things that it's hard to know what it means, so let me at least try to give you Oracle's definition. You're free to have your own definition," Ellison said, "but we want to be sure that you at least know what ours is."

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