Earlier today I said that Oracle really is a cloud company, and CEO Larry Ellison’s keynote this evening cemented that fact. In his Oracle Cloud keynote, Ellison revealed new Public Cloud services, including a Java platform-as-a-service and an Oracle database-a-a-service offering. Ellison also unveiled Oracle Social Network.

The public cloud site indicates that the Java PaaS will be based on WebLogic Server 11g, support Java EE standards and popular frameworks such as Spring. The database offering is based on Oracle Database 11g Release 2. Both offer RESTful APIs.

Ellison’s main talking point during the speech was that the Oracle Public Cloud will follow industry standards, but I’m still not entirely sure what he means by that. He did specifically call out Salesforce.com’s Heroku PaaS, saying the company’s implementation of Java will not run standard J2EE applications. Ellison said that applications built on-premises will run on Oracle Public Cloud, Amazon Web Services or any other cloud that follows “industry standards.” That’s not an entirely fair comparison, as Forrester analyst Stefan Ried point out, since Heroku is still in beta. But it should be pointed out that Heroku has always claimed that J2EE applications will run on Heroku. (I’ll be talking with Heroku about this soon, but I’d love to hear from developers with experience migrating Java apps to Heroku.)

Ellison played up security features of both Fusion Applications and Oracle Public Cloud, claiming that security has been built in from the ground up as part of the operating system and the platform, instead of being implemented at an application level. He said that other cloud providers such as Salesforce.com and Workday only had security at the application level and that Oracle will prevent you from even being able to write insecure apps on its platform. This claim makes little sense to me, and I doubt Oracle will take responsibility for security issues introduced by developers on its platform. But we’ll have to wait for more technical details to say for sure what’s going on here.

Ellison also came out swinging against lock-in, an accusation consistently leveled against his own company, saying that Salesforce.com customers are locked in but Oracle Cloud customers won’t be. Ellison pushed the Public Cloud APIs during the keynote, but failed to mention that Salesforce.com also has APIs.

Ellison spent a good chunk of time disparaging Salesforce.com. Marc Benioff has been railing against what he calls the “false cloud,” strongly implying that Oracle is a purveyor of false cloud products. That may have been part of what prompted Oracle to cancel Benioff’s OpenWorld keynote. Benioff ended up giving his talk at a restaurant across the street, where he escalated his criticism of Oracle. Ellison fired back in this talk, and even called into question the wisdom of Salesforce.com’s architectural decisions. He did not mention that he was an early investor in Salesforce.com and sat on the board during the time that many of those decisions were likely made (or if he did mention it, I missed it).

Services Angle

From what I’ve seen, both CEOs are out of line. Benioff’s criticisms made sense last year in the context of Oracle’s so-called “cloud in a box” Exadata. But Oracle has a come a long way and is now offering both its Fusion Applications as a cloud service, and will soon launch the said PaaS and DBaaS offerings. Fusion Applications addresses the mobile and social issues that Benioff has brought up as well.

But Ellison showed a distinct lack of class in giving Benioff a keynote and then taking it away at the last minute. And his criticisms of Salesforce.com don’t ring true – particularly on the matter of lock-in. Constellation Research analyst and CEO Ray Wang tweeted “all this talk about lockin will backfire.” Although Oracle has been like Teflon for the past few years, I think the lock-in accusation may finally stick, especially with Ellison himself spouting off about the issue in a keynote. The fact that he now has to talk about is proof that it’s something the company is having to address. And Unless Oracle has really changed its ways regarding lock-in, it could run into trouble down the line.

But one thing Benioff can be proud of: with a line of SaaS apps, a PaaS and RESTful APIs, Oracle is looking more and more like Salesforce.com every day.