Dogfight! Marc Benioff vs. Larry Ellison at Oracle OpenWorld 2011

I rarely report on enterprise software. It is usually boring news that no one wants to read. Yet this year’s Oracle OpenWorld event, which was held earlier today in San Francisco, was anything but boring.

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder and CEO, had asked Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s founder and CEO, to give a keynote presentation at his Oracle OpenWorld. But at the last minute Ellison pulled the plug on Benioff’s presentation.

Marc Benioff was not going to have any of this. He quickly declared war on his ex-boss, and relocated his keynote to a restaurant across the street from its original location. Benioff also hired picketers to, uhm, picket? (see above)

The event resembled a political rally. On one side of the street lay the democrats, on the other side lay the republicans. Salesforce’s logo is blue while Oracle’s is red. This made the joke all the more fun.

Like most political rallies, the keynote was a total waste of time. Benioff focused his message on “openness.” Salesforce’s Chatter, Database and Heroku are all open systems. Oracle’s offerings are all proprietary, or closed, systems. But really, who cares? The real story here is the Benioff-Ellison fight, not the boring enterprise stuff.