Oracle's Larry Ellison To IBM: "make Our Day"

JORDAN ROBERTSON

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Larry Ellison ratcheted up his rhetoric against IBM Corp. on Wednesday, challenging Oracle Corp.'s longtime partner and rival to "make our day" in a battle over business software performance.

Ellison, Oracle's billionaire CEO, shook up the technology world in April by outbidding IBM and snatching up struggling server and software maker Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.4 billion. The deal, which still needs approval from European antitrust authorities, would make Oracle more of a one-stop technology shop, like IBM. It led to a feeding frenzy on Sun's customers, with IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. playing on fears about Oracle's plans for Sun's technology to steal business from Sun.

Ellison fought back Wednesday in a speech in San Francisco, promoting a $10 million prize Oracle is offering to any organization that finds Oracle's database software doesn't run at least twice as fast on Sun servers as it does on IBM's fastest computers.

"IBM, you are more than welcome to enter," he said, to laughs from a crowd of Oracle customers at the company's OpenWorld conference. "If you'd like to take us on, make our day."