The growing rivalry between Salesforce.com and Oracle reached a pinnacle this week when Oracle reportedly canned a Salesforce.com keynote at its annual confab.
In a statement today, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Oracle cancelled his Wednesday morning address (U.S. time) at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 held in San Franciso’s Moscone Center. Instead, Benioff will organize a separate session at a nearby restaurant.
“Oracle just cancelled my keynote tomorrow. But the show must go on! Everyone is welcome to join me at Ame Restaurant tomorrow to hear about the social enterprise. Sorry Larry, the cloud can’t be stopped,” said Benioff, who worked at Oracle for 13 years before he started Salesforce.com in 1999.
Oracle told the New York Times that the changes were made because of “overwhelming attendance” at Oracle OpenWorld. The session was moved to Thursday at 8am in the Novellus Theatre. Benioff, however, said he would be unable to make it for the new slot due to travel plans.
Moreover, the turnout for Thursday morning sessions at the Oracle event is normally poor, as show delegates would still be recovering from the customer appreciation party the night before.
Salesforce and Oracle compete on business software that lets companies manage their sales operations, contact centers and other business processes. While Salesforce runs its products off the cloud, Oracle offers enterprise software that can housed on-premise in corporate data centers or on the cloud.
Salesforce concluded its own Dreamforce conference just about a month ago. With about 30,000 attendees out of 45,000 registered participants, the event has been growing in scale thanks to heightened interest in cloud computing in recent years.
It’s been interesting to see in recent years the escalating spat between the protege (Marc) and his past mentor (Larry).