Salesforce-Oracle rivalry heats up with Database.com

Later today, as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff kicks off his company's Dreamforce conference, he'll announce a push into Oracle's territory: databases.

Sam Diaz Senior editor, ZDNet

Sam Diaz is a senior editor at ZDNet. He has been a technology and business blogger, reporter and editor at the Washington Post, San Jose Mercury News, and Fresno Bee for more than 18 years.

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Sam Diaz

Dec. 7, 2010 9:21 a.m. PT

At the Oracle OpenWorld conference back in September, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff exchanged on-stage jabs as Ellison played up his company's push into Salesforce's territory: the cloud.

Later today, as Benioff takes the stage to kick off his company's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, he'll announce his company's push into Oracle's territory: databases.

Today, Salesforce is launching Database.com, pitching it as "the world's first enterprise database built for the cloud." In a statement, Benioff said:

We see cloud databases as a massive market opportunity that will power the shift to real-time enterprise applications that are natively cloud, mobile and social. For the first time, we are making Database.com, the database that is proven and trusted by our 87,000 customers, available as an open, stand-alone service to accelerate the creation of these new apps.

Read more of "Dreamforce: Salesforce-Oracle rivalry heats up with launch of Database.com" at ZDNet's Between the Lines.