JavaOne: Ellison Takes Jabs At RivalsJavaOne: Ellison Takes Jabs At Rivals

Oracle chairman and CEO Larry Ellison followed BEA Systems chief Bill Coleman onstage at JavaOne Thursday, then picked his rival apart. It was vintage Ellison--a keynote address to a major industry conference, which obfuscated lines between benchmarks and boasts, analysis and aggrandizement. But it sure left the crowd entertained.

"I was told I shouldn't give this presentation because it's impolite to deliver facts about Java performance," Ellison told a packed house of software developers, industry executives, and media observers at San Francisco's Moscone Center Thursday morning. "I'm sure [BEA chairman and CEO] Bill Coleman is thrilled with this presentation."

The presentation involved Ellison and his trusty keynote sidekick, Oracle chief marketing officer Mark Jarvis, running a series of software demos and slides that compared the price, performance, and size of Oracle's latest 9i Application Server with competing products from BEA and IBM. According to Ellison's slides, Oracle's new application server outperformed BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere on a variety of Web-page-serving applications, while beating those packages on price. "We're not cheap, except compared with IBM," Ellison said.

Moments before Ellison took the stage at the year's biggest Java development conference, Coleman said he wouldn't "blow up" at Oracle's claims, as he did in a speech earlier this year. At the BEA eWorld 2001 conference in February, Coleman said buying Oracle's software amounted to a money-losing proposition.

At JavaOne Thursday, Ellison countered with a one-two punch aimed at Coleman and favorite Oracle punching bag, Microsoft. "Just because you have BEA now doesn't mean you have to have it forever," said Ellison. It's "not the Microsoft of Java. You're not locked in."