Ellison gets the last laugh?

The end of software couldn't come soon enough for Salesforce.com Chief Executive Marc Benioff.

And it's not just because "no software" is his newly public company's motto or because Benioff has made a name for himself by hypothesizing the demise of expensive, high-maintenance programs from rivals SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.

Rather, Salesforce, which is trying to remake the software business model by delivering customer information programs as an online service over the Web, has had major software headaches of its own recently.

A problem with an Oracle database program that's a core component of the company's system caused several brief Web site outages earlier this week, according to several Salesforce customers. The database glitch, which also caused the site to respond slowly at times, apparently affected only some customers.

Steve Hartnack of Allied Office Products, a Salesforce client, characterized the service interruption as a minor irritation rather than a calamity. Still, for a company that touts a 99.9 percent availability rate, any unplanned downtime must be embarrassing. A Salesforce representative declined to comment on the incident.

The irony is all the greater, given that Benioff once worked for Oracle and was tight with Oracle boss Larry Ellison, an early investor in Salesforce. Benioff recently complained that Ellison had not yet thanked him for all the money Ellison made on the Salesforce IPO. Don't bet that Benioff's holding his breath for an apology about the outage, either.