The Salesforce.com chief went on to attack and argued that commodity hardware, rather than high-end super clusters were faster and more capable of supporting Cloud services, such as Salesforce.com's.

"Cloud is not about the mainframes prophesised by Larry," he said. "The reality is that it can be any commodity hardware. The hypnosis that the future is a new mainframe is wrong."

"[Using commodity hardware] you will do it ten times ten cheaper," Benioff said, alluding to Ellison's claims that .

"You can cancel keynotes, but you cannot cancel innovation," he said.

In his locknote speech at OpenWorld, a visibly annoyed Ellison repeatedly sledged Salesforce.com's decision to buy Ruby application platform-as-a-service provider Heroku, and asked the audience time and again to decide which vendor offered "the true Cloud."