Oracle and BEA chiefs face off at Java conference
By Lisa Baertlein
Thursday June 7, 9:59 pm Eastern Time
SAN FRANCISCO, May 7 (Reuters) - Software is a hard business. Just ask Larry Ellison and Bill Coleman, two chief executives at industry heavyweights that squared off on Thursday in a verbal sparring march that was tough even by the standards of an industry known for its sharp elbows.
The exchange between the chief executives of Oracle Corp. (NasdaqNM:ORCL - news) and BEA Systems Inc. (NasdaqNM:BEAS - news) on Thursday broke out during the keynote addresses at a developers' conference in San Francisco hosted by Sun Microsystems Inc.(NasdaqNM:SUNW - news).
BEA's Bill Coleman took the first jab.
``Talk and press releases are cheap,'' said Coleman, rejecting an Oracle marketing claim that it had ``leapfrogged'' BEA in its core application server business.
He went on to praise new features in BEA's WebLogic application server to an audience of several thousand programmers that specialize in Java, a platform that enables them to write software to run on different devices and operating systems.
Oracle and computer titan International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news) have taken aim at BEA, a fast-growing San Jose, California company built around its application server software that helps companies integrate the different software programs used to run their businesses.
A veteran of the noisy and wildly competitive software wars, Oracle founder Larry Ellison parried Coleman's blows and counter attacked.
Ellison, who took the stage after Coleman, came armed with numbers and slides claiming to show how Oracle's 9i application server is better, cheaper and faster than rival products from BEA and IBM.
During his off-the-cuff presentation, Ellison confessed that he had been told not to make his presentation.
``Other people's feelings could be hurt,'' Ellison quipped, spurring laughter and applause from the audience.
The heat of the exchange was not lost on Akamai Technologies Inc. (NasdaqNM:AKAM - news) Chief Executive George Conrades, who joined Ellison onstage for his demonstration.
``Pretty competitive up here, isn't it? Where is Bill Coleman?'' asked Conrades, who was clad in a sky-blue button-up shirt and tan sport coat and cut a professorial figure amid the gray and black suits that have become Silicon Valley's executive dress uniform.
In a follow-up briefing with reporters and analysts, Coleman dismissed Ellison's demonstration and disputed his statistics.
``Larry made them up on stage ... We have real stuff that real people use,'' Coleman said.
One software developer from Maryland, who watched from the audience but was reluctant to give her name lest she get caught in the cross-fire, said she was taken aback by the public spat.
``I was surprised that they'd come out in public and say those things,'' she said.
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