|
 Ellison, who this month gave up his position as chief executive of
the enterprise software behemoth he co-founded 37 years ago, stuck
to his tradition of delivering the main presentation at Oracle
OpenWorld.
Oracle surprised Wall Street on Sept. 18 with the announcement that
Ellison, who owns a quarter of the company, would be replaced by
presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd.
Oracle has stressed that nothing would change under the new
management structure, with the 70-year-old Ellison staying on as
executive chairman and chief technology officer.
Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd in a football-field-sized
room, Ellison mostly pitched Oracle's newest offerings in software
and other IT delivered over the Internet - a growing trend known as
cloud computing.
But he won laughter with a handful of off-script comments about his
new role at the company, including one during a demonstration of a
new service that lets customers easily move applications from their
own data centers to Oracle's cloud.
"I’m CTO now, I have to do my demos by myself. I used to have help,
now it’s gone," Ellison joked. "I love my new job by the way.”
Minutes later, as he filled in a webpage as part of the same
demonstration, he joked, "They took away my CEO title, they took
away my name. It’s been a rough few weeks."
Close to 60,000 people were enrolled for this year's OpenWorld,
which includes technical courses, cocktail parties and a concert by
Aerosmith. The event is a major opportunity for Ellison to pitch
Oracle's latest products and vision to corporate customers,
engineers and IT managers.
"He makes a big impact, the way he showcases his technology. His
selling power is great," said OpenWorld attendee Vijay Thakkar. "A
lot of people come just to see him."
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Ellison has previously edged back from Oracle's helm. He apologized
to Tuesday's audience for skipping his keynote speech at last year's
OpenWorld to be on the water with his Oracle Team USA sailing team
during the final neck-and-neck races of the America's Cup regatta.
Smaller, aggressive companies like Salesforce.com and Workday have
been offering competitive software and Internet-based products at
prices that often undercut Oracle, whose strategy has been to
integrate software with its own high-end, expensive hardware for
greater efficiency.
In response, Oracle has been acquiring cloud-related companies and
rolling out its own cloud-based products. But while those products
are growing quickly, they remain a small fraction of the company's
total business.
It was the second presentation in three days that Ellison devoted to
talking up the progress Oracle has made in cloud computing, which
accounts for just 5 percent of his company's revenue.
(Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Tom Brown)
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