Larry Ellison Has Learned To Embrace Cloud Computing, Not Convinced It’s An “Incredible New Thing”

Oracle’s Larry Ellison has acquired a reputation as a cloud computing opponent — after all, he famously called the term “complete gibberish” a few years ago. Today, however, he said, “I’m no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.”

In fact, Ellison made it sound like he doesn’t get enough credit for starting the trend: “NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet.’” That, he said, was an early example of software-as-a-service, and Salesforce.com co-founder Marc Benioff (who has worked to tie his company’s identity to the cloud) copied the idea a few months later, but “in a narrow way.” (Apparently this got a smirk out of Benioff, who was in the audience.)

Ellison said he still objects to some aspects of the interest in the cloud, specifically, the idea that “there’s this incredible new thing called cloud computing,” then other companies that have been around for a decade say, “Yeah, that’s us!” Instead of painting cloud computing as something completely new, Ellison said it’s more accurate to think of it as “a continuous, step-by-step evolution.”

“I like the word,” Ellison said. “I objected to some people saying it was new. I like it because it’s a charismatic brand for the next generation of computing.”