Oracle’s Larry Ellison eats his words on Cloud Computing

| May 28, 2010 | Comments (1)

After Ellison’s colorful rants about the cloud’s absurdity, idiocy, and nonsense, Oracle’s expanding its cloud technology, advocacy, and marketing.

After all the showmanship and on-stage theatrics, it really comes down to this: Larry Ellison is allowing his company to love the cloud because orange is the new pink for Oracle.

This story offers a, uh, colorful example of how leading IT companies eventually manage to get out of their own way and adapt to the realities of the marketplace to come up with creative approaches to solving customer problems.

Microsoft puts Office online, SAP puts its heart into SaaS, IBM re-energizes its hardware business, Hewlett-Packard moves beyond infrastructure, and Dell offers services.

And, perhaps most unlikely of all, Larry Ellison learns to—well, perhaps “embrace” is too strong a word; let’s go with tolerate—the cloud.

Because in the case of Ellison and Oracle cloud computing, just nine months ago we had one of the world’s most driven and competitive people (that would be Ellison) not just objecting to the idea of cloud computing, or expressing discomfort at the name (as IBM CEO Sam Palmisano and Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd both did at about exactly the same time), but absolutely ranting at the “ABSURDITY” of the idea and the “NITWIT” venture capitalists trying to invent a new industry by simply coming up with a new term.

A year earlier, in another high-energy rant about the sheer “IDIOCY” of cloud computing, we had a thoroughly bewildered and exasperated Ellison ask, “What the HELL is cloud computing?”

But oh what a difference a year or two—and a potentially lucrative market—can make! Today, Oracle offers two sets of cloud-enabling products and technologies: some of its core technologies like grid computing and middleware, still bearing their traditional names; and a second and newer group of tools to which Oracle has attached the very term—cloud computing—that only very recently sent Ellison into conniptions.

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Category: Cool Stuff, Executives, Oracle, Strategy

About Onuora Amobi: Onuora Amobi is the founder and CEO of Nnigma, a leading online marketing firm headquartered in Pasadena, California. A Microsoft MVP with close to two decades of IT experience, he is also the co-author of the Windows 7 Deployment Guide for small businesses and IT Professionals(http://www.windows7deploymentguide.com). View author profile.