Oracle: To Cloud or Not To Cloud …

First Oracle’s Larry Ellison bashes cloud computing as nothing but hype and then his company announces that it will let customers run Oracle 10g and 11g databases and its Fusion middleware in virtual machines within Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service (Oracle Unveils New Products, Then Drifts Into The Cloud ).

Larry’s quote, as reported by many sources, was;

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

Also Larry, what are you going to say to the cloud computing poster child and Oracle customer Salesforce.com ? Last week Parker Harris, their executive vice president for technology said:

“At Salesforce.com we massively scale Oracle databases as our core business. Oracle is a great company but we need to go beyond that. One bug can take out a massive complex if you get it wrong. Everybody has kind of hit this.”

Larry. You’re either with us, or against us. You should also read my earlier post on cloud databases.