Larry Ellison Is Needlessly Clouding Oracle's Cloud Message

So, if it's just a question of a little hyperbole and a problem with nomenclature, what's my beef?

Part of my annoyance is admittedly personal: Does Ellison really believe that his audience, which includes me and my fellow analysts, and a collection of rather intelligent customers and prospects, will walk away from an Oracle event that conflates fact, fantasy, and, shall we say, atypical terminology, with a positive impression of the company as a market leader?

To me Ellison's performance looked desperate, trivialized the important issues, and otherwise reminded me of Newt Gingrich's wacky presidential campaign and his reality-challenged ideas for the country--the equivalent of talking about going to the moon when the economy is teetering and the world is poised for war on three continents.

The rest of my annoyance is based on trying to understand why Ellison bothers to play the game this way at all. Fusion Apps is looking pretty good, customer uptake is decent for a nascent product, the competitive wins are convincing, and when you add recent the acquisitions in, it's safe to say that Oracle boasts the largest cloud apps portfolio in the business.

Why not just say that? And why not, if you're going to bash a competitor like SAP, hone in on the fact that it had to go outside twice to get its cloud strategy right (first hiring John Wookey after he quit Oracle and then giving the cloud apps strategy over to Lars Dalgaard of SuccessFactors), instead of making up some nonsense about SuccessFactors being the only cloud app that SAP has? Why not take Workday to task for something real, instead of pretending that the company has made a bad bet on using Flash when it has publicly committed itself to HTLM5? Why even bother claiming that Fusion started as a cloud project? Who bloody cares, really?

When it comes to Oracle, I have a dream. In that dream, Larry Ellison decides to take the high road, and just talk honestly and credibly about what his company does, has done, and will do, instead of putting on an intelligence-insulting show. There are plenty of people inside Oracle who already do that, though their voices are often drowned by Larry's hyperbole. It's time Larry took a chance on being more than just Larry Ellison the guy playing for cheap laughs and sound bites. Larry Ellison the reasoned market leader would be a refreshing change from what we're being subjected to today.

If only dreams could come true …

Josh Greenbaum is principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting, a Berkeley, Calif., firm that consults with end-user companies and enterprise software vendors large and small. Clients have included Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and other firms that are sometimes analyzed in his columns. Write him at [email protected].

New apps promise to inject social features across entire workflows, raising new problems for IT. In the new, all-digital Social Networking issue of InformationWeek, find out how companies are making social networking part of the way their employees work. Also in this issue: How to better manage your video data. (Free with registration.)