Somewhere in San Francisco Mark Benioff has a big smile on his face.
The CEO of Salesforce.com is sitting back and watching his rival Larry Ellison spend billions to try and compete in his cloud.
Just months after spending $1.5 billion to take over RightNow Technologies, Oracle is dropping another $1.9 billion for Taleo. All in order to expand its reach into cloud computing.
Salesforce.com has been living and thriving in the cloud for years. The San Francisco-based company already has a fancy office at One Market Plaza and it is now using its billions to build a colorful campus near AT&T Park.
Ellison is trying to move his company into Benioff's neighborhood. And he has apparently decided it is cheaper for him to acquire companies, such as RightNow and Taleo, to get Oracle into the cloud than to build his own technology.
The Oracle CEO famously had a very public feud with Benioff last October when he booted the Salesforce CEO as a keynote speaker at Oracle's OpenWorld show.
Benioff, who once worked for Ellison, had been criticizing Ellison and Oracle for offering customers false cloud computing.
Strangely enough, Ellison actually owns a piece of Benioff's cloud as well.
