Oracle's Ellison: We're cloud 2.0, multitenancy religion a crock

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison tossed a hand grenade at software as a service companies: Their cherished multitenancy architecture is vastly overrated and dated.

Speaking at on Oracle's earnings conference call, Ellison addressed the company's applications and their cloud-ready status. Late last year, Ellison got into a cloud war with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. The two mocked each other during Oracle OpenWorld.

Ellison apparently misses the Benioff banter. Ellison and Benioff make a fun combination since Salesforce.com is an Oracle customer yet the two companies try to kill each other in the CRM market. Oracle is the top dog in CRM, according to IDC.

Here's Ellison in his own words:

Our whole approach to kind of, if you will, Cloud 2.0, is people say we're not building multi-tenancy software. Remember, when I started my little company, NetSuite, and six months later when Marc Benioff started his company, Salesforce.com, that was over a decade ago, when virtualization wasn't so common for isolating different customers running on the same machine.

So, Cloud 2.0, we used virtualized elastic cloud technology -- very different than, let's say, what salesforce.com is using -- more than -- almost 15-year old multi-tenancy technology. We are offering a much higher degree of security, a much higher degree of isolation, when you run on our public cloud, which looks a lot more like Amazon.com, let's say, than salesforce.com.

We think that modern technology has such a huge security advantage that we'll -- salesforce.com will be facing very, very serious competition for when -- as Fusion is rolled out this year. And SAP has no answers at all -- they've got nothing.

So we've been competing very effectively against SAP over the last several years. We've passed them in North America; we've tied them in Europe except for in German-speaking Europe. And now they are faced with -- what have you got for cloud? That would be, nothing.

While we have a completely rewritten suite of applications built entirely in Java, runs on Cloud 2.0, virtual elastic -- an elastic cloud that's virtualized. We have technology advantages over salesforce.com, but they've got nothing over at SAP. So we think this is going to be a huge contributor to us this year and the following year and the year after that. And it's going to allow us to take a significant amount of share from SAP and some share from my friend at salesforce -- who, by the way, the salesforce guys are big customers of ours. So, you know? When they sell, we make money. When we sell ours, we make money. We like that.

Good times. Your serve Benioff.