
A week ago it would have been unthinkable. Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff not only on the same conference call together, but playing nice with one another.
No 'roach motel' insults from Ellison. No 'beware the false Cloud' warnings from Benioff.
Just...well, nice stuff about one another.
"I couldn't be more thrilled to make this announcement with you today, Larry," began Benioff.
"By Larry and I coming together, a door has opened that lets us go through into the future, and we're not going to be held back by how the industry was."
Ellison was slightly less effusive perhaps, but as keen to please. "Salesforce.com has always been an important customer, but this is not about that," he said. "It's about the partnership with Salesforce.com, making our products work better together. Salesforce.com is a big company now. Customers expect us to work together professionally toward the benefit of those customers.
"Virtually every time we buy a company, they are running Salesforce.com's CRM," he added. "In the old days, we would slide them onto our Fusion salesforce app right away. Now, we'll leave some of those companies on Salesforce.com."
Benioff was keen to praise the Oracle database technology to which he's now committed Salesforce.com for the next 12 years.
"You know, Larry, the Oracle database has been a key part of Salesforce 's infrastructure from the very beginning of our company 14 years ago," he noted. "Absolutely the best decision we ever made was to go with Oracle.
"Now we're at a critical point in Salesforce.com's history. We have to make a decision. Is the infrastructure we've built on Oracle going to take us through the next one or two decades? The answer is yes.
"And now that (Oracle has) focused on the Cloud, (Oracle has) made a number of improvements to the database technologies that are extremely important to us and we are delighted now to commit to this incredible partnership to another 12 years of using the Oracle database."
But what about all those slanging matches and accusations - you can't just paper over the cracks of a shattered relationship so easily surely?
And for anyone thinking that the industry might a tad duller without the bickering and the feuding, fear not.
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Neil Davey is the managing editor of MyCustomer. An experienced business journalist and editor, Neil has worked on a variety of newspapers, magazines and websites over the past 20 years, including Internet Works, CXO magazine and Business Management. He joined MyCustomer in 2007.
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