Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison dished out some serious trash talk last week when he announced that the company was officially getting into the public cloud business. Calling Salesforce.com "the roach motel of clouds," Ellison initiated a war of words among vendors vying for supremacy in the cloud services sector. 

The battle that Ellison ignited pits the Oracle cloud model, in which hardware and software is tightly integrated by the vendor, against the Salesforce model, in which multiple technologies from different vendors work together, writes Quentin Hardy at The New York Times.

Ellison, who championed his way as the one that delivers the best performance and the best security, said at an Oracle conference last week that the Salesforce way is "a very bad security model."

Ellison is known for his provocative language, so last week's trash talk did not come as a real surprise, particularly because Oracle had just previously canceled a speech at the conference by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. While Ellison was publicly insulting Salesforce, Benioff wrote on his Twitter account "You can't buy this type of advertising. Thank you Larry!"

Hardy notes that a similar battle between closed systems and open systems is taking place in other parts of the tech industry. Facebook makes many of its specifications public to enable others to make use of it, while Google keeps much of its technology close to the vest, for example.

"In some ways, this battle is akin to the open source-proprietary software conflicts--Linux versus Microsoft, for example--that have gone on for decades, and each side chooses the version that suits its values and business model," Hardy writes. "Once again, there will likely be significant proof points and areas of dispute around issues like security, cost, and performance."

For more:
- see Quentin Hardy's article at The New York Times

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