Marc Andreessen to Larry Ellison: You’re my idol. And Oracle’s day are numbered
Hewlett-Packard’s perhaps most respected board member, Marc Andreessen, wasted no time trashing its Silicon Valley antagonist, Oracle, at a conference Wednesday.
“The clock is really ticking,” he said about oldline software companies, singling out Oracle as “the most vivid case.”
Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, invests in upstart software companies such as cloud-storage service Box, which hosted the conference that Andreessen spoke at on Wednesday.
He also got in a dig at Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison. “Larry is one of my idols,” Andreessen said. “I wouldn’t quite say my role model,” he quickly followed up as the audience laughed.
HP and Oracle have feuded in court over Oracle’s hiring of ousted HP chief executive Mark Hurd. And the two companies are currently in litigation over Oracle’s announcement that its software would no longer support the Itanium chips co-developed by HP and Intel.
HP’s board chairman is Kleiner Perkins managing partner Ray Lane, whom Ellison pushed out of his position as Oracle president and chief operating officer in 2000.
Of course, HP could also be considered one of those “oldline” companies– but it has made some stabs at becoming more cutting edge, including picking up software-as-service technology Opsware, formerly known as Loudcloud. Thank Andreessen for that– he co-founded Loudcloud, which eventually sold for $1.6 billion in 2007.
Where’s Leo? At HQ, want a picture?
After weeks of sometimes comical coverage on the whereabouts of new HP CEO Leo Apotheker — a farce that had come to be know as “Where’s Leo?” — the company was likely happy that the subject was almost ignored in the aftermath of its earnings report on Monday. Almost.
Apotheker’s precise location became an issue when Oracle made it known that it was trying to subpoena HP’s head man as part of its high-profile lawsuit against SAP, where Apotheker was previously CEO. Oracle, waging a skillful PR war against its newest foe, claimed Apotheker was ducking the subpoena, which would have put him on the stand in federal court in Oakland, California. Oracle even hired private investigators to track him down.
HP, for its part, refused to divulge his location, and accused Oracle of harassing Apotheker. SAP called the hunt for him a “sideshow.”
Given all that, Apotheker could not have been all that surprised when he was asked point blank on a media conference call on Monday where he was at that precise moment.
“You mean physically right now?” Apotheker responded slyly. “That’s a bit of an odd question… in Palo Alto, at HP’s headquarters together with a bunch of people.” Before adding: “Would you like a picture?”
Apotheker has been globe-trotting over the past few weeks as he meets HP’s far flung employees and customers. He said his travels had taken him to Massachusetts, Germany, and Singapore, to name a few stops. For the record, he also surfaced in Japan and Texas.
With all eyes on Hurd, plenty of praise for new employer
It may have been the most anticipated tech earnings conference call of the year.
It’s a good bet many many folks in Silicon Valley, and tech investors in general, were dialed in to Oracle’s presentation on Thursday, eager to hear the first public utterances of new president Mark Hurd, the recently exiled CEO of technology giant Hewlett-Packard.
And it may have been a bit painful for Hurd’s former colleagues at HP to hear him quickly lavish praise on his new employer:
“I don’t believe there is any other company in the industry better positioned than Oracle,” Hurd said in one of his first public statements as president of the world’s No. 3 software maker.
“Over the last 25 years, I’ve competed against and partnered with Oracle and I can tell you that Oracle has amassed the most enviable portfolio of technology in the industry,” he said.
(Incidentally, Hurd had not been quite so effusive about HP in his final months at the company. On an earnings conference call in May, Hurd merely said HP had “more work to do to transform ourselves to reach our potential”, was “uniquely positioned to win,” and “well-positioned to capitalize.”)
Hurd was ousted from HP in early August in a controversial fashion, accused of filing inaccurate expense reports related to a female contractor who worked for his office. He landed at Oracle a month later, lured by pal and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. But a clearly irked HP quickly sued to block him from joining the company, which both partners and competes with HP.
from DealZone:
Playing in Larry’s sandbox
Having spent more than $42 billion to buy about 60 companies, Larry Ellison’s Oracle has set something of a daunting standard for merger activity in the business software industry. So while SAP’s plan to buy smaller business software maker Sybase for $5.8 billion may not roil markets, it could certainly shake up things in an already busy infotech sector.
With Sybase, SAP gets a boost in mobile technology, but will also end up with a big database business that provides steady revenues but little else on which SAP can grow its business.
The database chunk is by far the bigger earner for Sybase, with the mobile aps business accounting for only a little over a quarter of annual revenue, so it could make an attractive business for SAP to hive off. Breakingviews columnist Robert Cyran points out that keeping a hand in the database world could also prove awkward for SAP as it exacerbates competitive friction with its allies, Microsoft and IBM.
SAP could also look to sell the database business to cash up for any more strategic moves. Given this is the second-biggest deal for SAP in its nearly 40-year history, and marks the first big move since a management shakeup, the sandbox that so recently seemed to be Larry’s exclusive territory is only going to become more crowded.
What on earth is ‘cloud computing’?
Silicon Valley billionaire Larry Ellison shed a little sunshine on “cloud computing” on Thursday at a financial analyst meeting held by Oracle Corp, the software company that he founded and runs (when he’s not making into the headlines for his more nautical pursuits).
We’ve redefined ‘cloud computing’ to include everything we currently do. So it has already achieved dominance in the industry. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing.
The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Cloud Computing. I remember I was reading W and I read that orange is the new pink. And cloud is the new SaaS. (Software as a Service) Or cloud is the new virtualization. It is the most nonsensical. I mean I read these articles … I have no idea what anybody is talking about. I mean it is really just complete gibberish.
What is it? What is it? … Is it – ‘Oh, I am going to access data on a server on the Internet.’ That is cloud computing?
Then there is a definition: What is cloud computing? It is using a computer that is out there. That is one of the definitions: ‘That is out there.’ These people who are writing this crap are out there. They are insane. I mean it is the stupidest.
And he wasn’t done yet: “When is this idiocy going to stop?” And “What the hell is cloud computing?” followed. And then this:
We’ll make cloud computing announcements because if orange is the new pink, we’ll make orange… Okay fine, we’ll do some cloud. Maybe we’ll do an ad. I don’t know what we’ll do differently in light of cloud computing other than change the wording on some of our ads. It’s crazy. So that’s my view.
Still lost in the clouds?
Its funny that this is coming from Ellison who 13 years ago talked about a project that is similar to cloud computing:
http://www.usfca.edu/~morriss/478/projec ts_972/Introduction.html
andreessen’s comments are nothing more than an attempt to deflect attention away from the ongoing pr crisis at hp: http://littlebiggy.org/2882567