Larry Ellison may not be the CEO of Oracle anymore, but that doesn’t mean he’s toned down the cocky attitude.
At his second keynote address at Oracle’s Open World conference, Ellison focused mainly on the new capabilities of the Oracle Cloud platform, but was able to fit in a few zingers about the competition as well.
“As you can see, in come areas we’re leaders, such as marketing,” Ellison said casually as he presented the many fields in which Oracle was building cloud applications.
Ellison also found an opportunity to take a shot at his former protege turned rival Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Ellison said Oracle was the only company that let customers build extensions on their applications using Oracle’s existing platform, which is something other companies don’t offer.
“Nothing against my old friend Marc Benioff, but Salesforce builds on our platform, they build on Java, and they build on Oracle databases,” said Ellison. “When they sell you a platform service Salesforce1, it’s not the same platform they build on, they have one platform they use, and a totally different proprietary platform they give you to build extensions.”
Oracle has some powerful marketing automation tools in the form of Eloqua and Responsys, and with BlueKai, it has a chance to offer a powerful data integration within its Marketing Cloud. But claiming to be a leader in the field is a bit of stretch, even for the famously brash Ellison.
In the only formal evaluation to date of the enterprise marketing clouds, Oracle trailed behind Adobe, and even IBM in Forrester’s report on Digital Experience Delivery platforms. It was a conclusion we also reached in our own report “Who is winning the marketing cloud wars?”
While Oracle is certainly competing fiercely, it would be safe to say it isn’t a leader. In fact, nobody is until we see a true marketing cloud with seamless integration between all its applications.
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