Benioff pokes fun at former mentor Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on his cloud computing vision
Benioff will always be Benioff, even sick like he was today at GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.
Asked by Om Malik about Oracle’s CEO “flip-flop” cloud computing strategy, the Salesforce.com CEO and co-founder just couldn’t help ridicule his former mentor, Larry Ellison.
“6 months ago he said it’s ridiculous and made some very caustic remarks which is not very much like him and then he said something very Zen in a kind of very spiritual or mentor way…
the key to cloud computing, the key… grasshopper… to on-demand is on premise. And the key to on-premise is on-demand. And you can not have on-demand without on-premise, and you can not have on-premise without on-demand.
It was very Zen. It was like hitting a new level of enlightenment when I heard of it. This guy’s got it. On-demand is on-premise and yet on-premise is on-demand.
And if you can understand that then you’ll know why cloud computing is what it is.”
So here it go. The secret of cloud computing. Now study that… grasshopper 
And for your amusement, here’s the video clip where Benioff explained Oracle’s cloud vision!
