Larry Ellison in Israel

Posted on August 10, 2007 by Guy Snir
Filed Under Open Source, Database, Enterprise, Linux, Oracle, Medical, MySQL, Israel |

Larry Ellison made his first visit to Israel this week, so Oracle Israel and Globes organized an invitation only live appearance for the members of the Israeli business and IT market.

I was hoping to hear from him a little bit about Open Source issues. Most of the talk was about the history of Oracle and innovation. Larry Ellison described how thinking against conventional wisdom was key to the imperative head start they had on IBM (considering Oracle started off with a whopping capital of $2000).

Since it was a mixed audience of technical and non-technical people, the appearance was with general content with no exiting technical news. I can say that it seems as if the subject of consolidating and digitizing (into an Oracle database) the U.S. Health Care Records is very important to him, as this was a topic discussed in most of the speech.

Luckily, during the Q&A, someone asked “What do you think about Open Source?”, and Mr. Ellison jokingly rephrased the question as “Are you terrified of Open Source and think it will kill your business?”

His answer was rather standard, he claimed that an Open Source software prevails not because of the cost or because it is Open Source but because it is better, as examples he talked about Oracle choosing to use [in IAS] the Apache web server over IIS because it was better and that Oracle promotes and invests in Linux because it is better than Windows. According to him the license fees are only about 10% of the TCO, so costs savings should not be the main factor in choosing the software.

Commenting on MySQL, Larry said that they have a nice technology, and if your needs are read intensive and security is not an issue, god bless you, choose MySQL. But, if you have an intense transactional application and require high security you would have to go with Oracle, which is at least a decade ahead of them.

On a personal note, I found him to be rather similar to the image I had of him, as a fun, unconventional and impressive person.

Update: Haaretz wrote about Larry Ellison’s comments on Open Source: “Oracle CEO Ellison: Open source software is no threat“.