Advertisment

Oracle, BEA chiefs faceoff at Java conference

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

By Lisa Baertlein

Advertisment

SAN FRANCISCO: Software is a hard business. Just ask Larry Ellison and Bill

Coleman, two chief executives at industry heavyweights that squared off on

Thursday in a verbal sparring march that was tough even by the standards of an

industry known for its sharp elbows. The exchange between the chief executives

of Oracle Corp. and BEA Systems Inc. on Thursday broke out during the keynote

addresses at a developers' conference in San Francisco hosted by Sun

Microsystems Inc.

BEA's Bill Coleman took the first jab. "Talk and press releases are

cheap," said Coleman, rejecting an Oracle marketing claim that it had

"leapfrogged" BEA in its core application server business. He went on

to praise new features in BEA's WebLogic application server to an audience of

several thousand programmers that specialize in Java, a platform that enables

them to write software to run on different devices and operating systems.

Oracle and computer titan International Business Machines Corp. have taken

aim at BEA, a fast-growing San Jose, California company built around its

application server software that helps companies integrate the different

software programs used to run their businesses. A veteran of the noisy and

wildly competitive software wars, Oracle founder Larry Ellison parried Coleman's

blows and counter attacked.

Advertisment

Ellison, who took the stage after Coleman, came armed with numbers and slides

claiming to show how Oracle's 9i application server is better, cheaper and

faster than rival products from BEA and IBM. During his off-the-cuff

presentation, Ellison confessed that he had been told not to make his

presentation.

"Other people's feelings could be hurt," Ellison quipped, spurring

laughter and applause from the audience.

The heat of the exchange was not lost on Akamai Technologies Inc. Chief

Executive George Conrades, who joined Ellison onstage for his demonstration.

Advertisment

"Pretty competitive up here, isn't it? Where is Bill Coleman?"

asked Conrades, who was clad in a sky-blue button-up shirt and tan sport coat

and cut a professorial figure amid the gray and black suits that have become

Silicon Valley's executive dress uniform. In a follow-up briefing with reporters

and analysts, Coleman dismissed Ellison's demonstration and disputed his

statistics. "Larry made them up on stage ... We have real stuff that real

people use," Coleman said.

One software developer from Maryland, who watched from the audience but was

reluctant to give her name lest she get caught in the cross-fire, said she was

taken aback by the public spat. "I was surprised that they'd come out in

public and say those things," she said.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.

tech-news