Larry Ellison

Back in 1995, Larry Ellison wanted to buy Apple so he could help his buddy Steve Jobs get his job back. But, being a good businessman, he also wanted to make a lot of money. The story comes to us via Walter Isaacson's new biography, aptly titled Steve Jobs . At the time, the man who brought us the iPod, iPhone and Apple computer wasn't so keen on the idea. "I'm not a hostile takeover kind of guy," he said. A year later, Apple asked Jobs to return to the company -- without Ellison. Since the...Read Full Story

Well, well, well. The Oracle OpenWorld Conference is in full swing, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers tomorrow (Wednesday). “Was” being the operative word here. Thanks to a recent update from Benioff’s Twitter account, it seems that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has cancelled Mr. Benioff’s keynote tomorrow. Hmmm. Instead, Larry will be king of the stage, with a one hour and forty-five minute keynote, kicking off at 2:45 p.m. PST. No word as of yet on...Read Full Story

FRANKFURT ( Reuters ) - SAP's $3.4 billion takeover of SuccessFactors will help it keep up with peers in the frenzied race for cloud-computing business, even if the price it paid is very high at first glance, analysts said on Monday. "We believe SuccessFactors could be a very good strategic fit for SAP in the cloud sector and we prefer the decision to grow externally in this booming area," DZ Bank analyst Oliver Finger said. SAP said on Saturday it was buying U.S. web-based services company...Read Full Story

Today, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to talk about the current landscape of the cloud for the first time since the public back-and-forth between himself and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison . For those unfamiliar, earlier this month, Ellison cancelled Benioff’s keynote talk at The Oracle OpenWorld Conference. Benioff wasn’t particularly psyched about the move, and gave a fiery talk from the St. Regis Hotel across the street instead. Benioff took...Read Full Story

Today, at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, an animated Larry Ellison took to the stage to unveil an assortment of cloud computing services, which will run the company’s long-time-in-coming (six years, in fact, Fusion Applications — most notably the “Oracle Public Cloud”. And, not one to miss an opportunity, Ellison made sure to take quite a few public jabs at Salesforce — and vicariously, its CEO Marc Benioff — whose keynote earlier in the day was cancelled due to “overwhelming...Read Full Story