By Lisa Baertlein
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.
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.
"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.