Tech Boss rips Salesforce.com, Dell, Red Hat, IBM, Netezza, Teradata, EMC and NetApp in his keynote remarks.

Quick…what’s worse – being an Oracle competitor or an Oracle partner? Judging from Larry Ellison’s keynote tonight at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 there really isn’t much difference. The message is clear – Oracle is out to compete with everyone who sells hardware and software in the data center.

In his remarks this week at Oracle OpenWorld, Marc Benioff said “we come in peace.” Ellison evidently doesn’t share his sentiments. Check out this clip where Oracle skewers Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff but even worse, flat out suggests that Oracle’s products are superior to Dell’s for running cloud applications like Salesforce. This not long after Oracle’s  ‘partner’ Michael Dell addressed the audience at OpenWorld:

The attacks didn’t end there. Ellison duly recognized the importance of Red Hat compatibility and then told his audience that Oracle needed to make improvements  Red Hat:

“We needed an OS that was much more secure, much more reliable and faster than what we could have achieved with Red Hat alone.”

He then went on to hammer away at IBM, Netezza, Teradata and EMC, claiming that Exadata leaves these products in the dust when it comes to database performance. According to Ellison:

“Exadata is much faster than EMC’s disk array – 5 to 10 times faster.”

Oracle can “move data 10, 20, 30 times faster than you can move data from an EMC disk array.”

“It (EMC) will never be competitive.”

Ellison said that Oracle moved a lot of database software out of the database into the storage servers—which he said you would get with EMC. Speaking again about EMC, Ellison said:

“They could never build anything like that.”

He went on to say that the “Exadata bandwidth is 50 times faster than what you would get when you talk to an EMC disk array…or NetApp’s disk array.”

About IBM, Ellison said this:

“IBM’s big fast machines are not fault tolerant…they’re old SMP vertical scale-up systems with no fault tolerance…they’re loaded with single points of failure.”

What’s the Angle on Oracle?

Oracle’s strategy is clear since acquiring Sun. Take the piece parts of technologies including servers, storage, databases, virtualization and application software and integrate the components into a single unit that is pre-tested and pre-configured. Sell the value of reduced risk, lower cost, higher performance and simplicity and squeeze the competition out of as many deals as possible.

Where customers are too reluctant to move to an all-Oracle environment, partner with competitors and leverage a large and aggressive direct sales force to get as much share of wallet as possible.

Many companies recognize Oracle is a direct threat but also realize the company is so powerful and has such leverage over them that they have to play along. Take the case of Dell this week at OpenWorld. Dell puts a huge investment into the event, markets its presence at the show to the world, brings in its customers and Oracle says “thanks – let’s rumble.”

This is why Oracle’s relationship with partners is generally cooling. While Oracle made up with HP over Mark Hurd’s joining the company, and Ellison largely left HP out of his remarks, the two companies are very clearly on a collision course. Oracle is Sun on steroids and HP and Sun and IBM and Dell were bitter rivals. Like Syndrome in the movie The Incredibles, a once-weakened Sun has awakened having been subsumed in a new Oracle persona. The new Syndrome is ruthless, dangerous, and bad and will stop at nothing to dominate the world.

I think many tech CEOs were caught off-guard by Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and didn’t expect Oracle could move so quickly. But the reality is that Oracle started down this path years ago and CEOs have been forced to respond. EMC’s acquisition of Greenplum and IBM’s move on Netezza are not just opportunistic, they’re defensive because Oracle is so aggressive and such a looming threat.

The vibe at OpenWorld was decisively onerous this week. Despite the veneer, Oracle is closed, proprietary, controlling, ruthless, self-serving and very smart. There is no question in my mind that Oracle’s agenda is to grow the company to $100B in revenue while sustaining its obscene (nearly 40%) operating margins. In my opinion, Oracle doesn’t care about its partners other than to gain access to customers that aren’t all-Oracle. Oracle’s technology portfolio and marketing are incredible and in my view competitors need to wake up or get rolled.

The playbook to compete with Oracle is to acquire and partner to gain access to IP, out-innovate the company, provide better customer service and compete on the basis of value. Customers are leery of Oracle and are desperately seeking alternatives. Companies need to provide one and be less timid about competing. My advice is Oracle is going to come after you so you may as well take your shots while you can.