Oracle CTO Ellison Rolls Up Sleeves, Gives Live Tech Demos At OpenWorld

Oracle recently got a new CTO -- his name is Larry Ellison and he's better known as the guy who co-founded the company and has spent the better part of four decades as CEO building it into an enterprise software powerhouse.

But in a keynote Tuesday at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Ellison was the CTO, which meant rolling up his sleeves and giving live, onstage technical demos.

While a CEO might have relied on assistants for such demos, Ellison was alone onstage -- and seemed to prefer it that way.

[Related: Oracle's Ellison Stepping Down As CEO, Catz And Hurd To Share CEO Duties]

"Now, because I'm CTO I get to do my own demos," Ellison said. "I love my new job, by the way."

Ellison showed how customers can now move Oracle databases and apps to its cloud "with the push of a button." In a demo, he moved a 250 gigabyte, on-premise database for a Wiki app into Oracle's cloud.

In another demo, Ellison demoed a new "Employee of the Month" extension for its Human Capital Management (HCM) cloud SaaS app.

Ellison stepped down earlier this month as CEO and passed the reins to co-CEOs Mark Hurd and Safra Catz. That leadership shuffle is now seen as a largely symbolic move, since Ellison is still setting Oracle's technical direction as he's done for years.

Ellison is also continuing to hammer home the point that Oracle, with its IaaS, PaaS and vast portfolio of SaaS apps, has a cloud portfolio that no other vendor can match.

Most SaaS companies do not sell platform services, and the few that do don't sell customers the same platform they use to build their own apps, Ellison said.

Salesforce.com builds its apps using Oracle's database and Java programming language but uses different technology in the Salesforce1 service it sells to customers, Ellison said.

"They have one platform they use and a totally different, proprietary, non-standards based platform they offer to [customers] to make extensions to those apps," Ellison said of Salesforce. "That's not our approach."

For enterprises, running Java apps and databases on Oracle's new Platform-as-a-Service is cheaper than running them on premise, Ellison said.

Not only do apps run more efficiently in Oracle's cloud, they also become multi-tenant without customers having to change a single line of code, Ellison said.

Customers with non-Java apps can run them on Oracle's Infrastructure-as-a-Service and get similar advantages, Ellison said.

Oracle's PaaS, which hit the market earlier this month, looks very similar to Oracle's on-premise development environment, according to Ellison.

"You have complete access to your own virtual machines, your own version of Linux and a dedicated database," Ellison said. "All the tools that work on Oracle on premise, work on Oracle in the cloud."

PUBLISHED SEPT. 30, 2014