Bitter rivals Oracle, Salesforce team up on cloud

June 26, 2013 Leave a comment

Bitter rivals Oracle, Salesforce team up on cloud

12:02pm EDT

By Jim Finkle

BOSTON (Reuters) – Oracle Corp, the technology giant losing market share to younger firms that sell software via the Web, has signed a long-term partnership with archrival and cloud computing pioneer Salesforce.com Inc. The two companies said on Tuesday that Oracle will integrate some of its cloud-based software programs with Salesforce products. The companies gave few details on the unprecedented partnership, which also calls for Salesforce to expand its own use of Oracle products. Oracle, which unveiled a separate cloud partnership with longtime rival Microsoft Corp on Monday, is looking to accelerate growth by expanding sales of cloud-computing products, one of the few fast-growing areas in the technology sector. Oracle shares have grown 35 percent over the past five years, while Salesforce stock has soared more than 100 percent. The alliance marks a dramatic shift by Oracle co-founder and Chief Executive Larry Ellison toward Salesforce and its CEO Marc Benioff, who Ellison has derided for more than a decade. A bitter rivalry traces back to 2000, when Benioff fired Ellison from the Salesforce board of directors after Oracle started selling competitive software. Spokeswomen for both companies declined to elaborate beyond the announcement in a press release. That contrasted sharply with Monday’s unveiling of the new Oracle-Microsoft partnership, heralded in a press conference featuring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Oracle President Mark Hurd. The products that Salesforce plans to purchase from Oracle include one that manages human resources, known as human capital management software. That may signal that Salesforce has canceled ambitious plans to develop similar software that would compete with Oracle software. Benioff disclosed those plans to Reuters in December 2011. (reut.rs/sjtfcM) Benioff could not be reached for comment.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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