Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison has bought yet another home in Malibu, making it his 10th purchase on Carbon Beach, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Ellison bought the house from TV producer Jerry Bruckheimer. The house was not on the market, and no real estate agents were involved in the deal.

The price of Ellison paid hasn't been revealed yet.

Ellison most likely wanted to snatch up the property because he already owns the houses on either side of Bruckheimer's former residence. It's no secret Ellison loves buying real estate. He made a $500 million deal earlier this year to buy an entire island.

His new pad has 70 feet of ocean frontage, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and spans 2,239 square feet.

The stretch of beach is known as "Billionaire's Beach" for the wealthy people who live there, including entertainment mogul David Geffen, former Dodgers Chief Executive Jamie McCourt, and businessman Michael Milken.

SEE ALSO: Biig, Beautiful Photos Of Larry Ellison's $600 Million Hawaiian Island

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Larry Ellison has been called " the nation's most avid trophy-home buyer."

Now the Oracle CEO has snatched up another home on Carbon Beach in Malibu, making it the 10th property he owns in the area, nicknamed "Billionaire's Beach," according to The Los Angeles Times.

He purchased the home from TV producer Jerry Bruckheimer for a yet-to-be-revealed price. He already owned the homes on either side of Bruckheimer.

Ellison, 68, has quite an impressive real estate portfolio. This year alone he's purchased two Malibu homes and an island in Hawaii for a rumored $600 million.  He also owns homes in Woodside, Calif. Newport, RI, and Kyoto, Japan.

Ellison is third on Forbes' 400 List, with a net worth of $41 billion. 

Ellison bought this property in Woodside, Calif. for $12 million in 1995. The home is modeled after a 16th century Japanese emperor's residence. It sits on 23 acres of land and is now worth an estimated $70 million.

Source: The WSJ and The San Francisco Chronicle

Larry Ellison bought 2850 Broadway in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1998 for $3.9 million. In 2011, Ellison sued his neighbors, claiming their redwoods were blocking his bay views.

Source: The San Francisco Chronicle

It was rumored that Ellison planned to spend $40 million on the house next door for a better view, but the sale never happened.

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Oracleearnings are out!

Revenue came in at $9.1 billion versus $9.03 billion expected. EPS came in at $0.64 versus $0.61 expected.

The stock is trading higher after-hours, climbing 2.77%.

New software licenses and cloud software subscriptions revenues were up 17% to $2.4 billion.

Hardware systems products revenues were $734 million. Year over year, hardware revenue declined 23%.

Oracle execs repeatedly credited the company's "highly profitable engineered systems segment" of its hardware busines for big margins. The company says that the growth of its software business, plus that part of its hardware business, lead to a non-GAAP operating margin of 47%.

This is Oracle's second quarter of fiscal 2013. CEO Larry Ellison is promising that the company's hardware business will be growing by the end of fiscal 2013.

“Sun has proven to be one of the most strategic and profitable acquisitions we have ever made,” he said. "I believe that products like Exadata and the SPARC SuperCluster will not only continue to drive improved profitability in our hardware business, by the end of this fiscal year, they will also drive growth in our hardware business.”

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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison repeated his promise that the company's hardware business will stop shrinking and start growing within six months.

The company reported results for the second quarter of its 2013 fiscal year Tuesday. Revenues for the hardware business were down 23% to $734 million, compared to $953 million for the year-ago period.

That's all part of the plan.

"Sun has proven to be one of the most strategic and profitable acquisitions we have ever made,” Ellison said.“Sun technology enabled Oracle to become a leader in the highly profitable engineered system segment of the hardware business. I believe that products like Exadata and the SPARC SuperCluster will not only continue to drive improved profitability in our hardware business, by the end of this fiscal year, they will also drive growth in our hardware business.”

He's been making this same promise for months.

Until earlier this year, Sun was considered to be a failed acquisition. But Ellison says shrinking revenues are because he's getting rid of Sun's low-margin, commodity x86 server and storage products.

Employees inside the company tell Business Insider that those selling commodity systems have been targeted for layoffs—which makes business sense if Oracle doesn't want to be in that business anymore.

Instead, Ellison is looking to sell high-margin "engineered systems" designed to run specific Oracle software products. These are known as the Exa line of hardware products and include Exadata, Exalogic, and Exalytics servers. It also includes the Sparc SuperCluster, a high-end, general-purpose system for running databases and apps.

Prior to Oracle's purchase of Sun, the "Exa" line were built using Oracle's designs, with help from HP, then a partner, analysts say. By acquiring Sun and bringing the Exa line in house, Oracle alienated HP.

Given the state of HP these days, maybe it was sheer brilliance on Ellison's part to go it alone with engineered systems.

But first, he's got to make the hardware business grow as promised.

Don't miss: The 10 Best Enterprise Tech Companies To Work For

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You may not have heard the last of John Connor, if Larry Ellison's son and daughter have anything to say about it.

And they do.

Megan and David Ellison own the rights to the "Terminator" franchise and may be working together on a new movie, reports SFist's Jay Barmann.

Megan Ellison had won a bidding war for the the Terminator franchise back in May 2011, Deadline's Mike Flemming Jr. reported at the time. The rights included agreements with Justin Lin to direct and Arnold Schwarzenegger to star. So far, there's been no real progress on the movie but Megan just signed brother David on to be a coproducer.

They had better a get a move on, because in 2019, the Terminator series turns 35, and at that time the rights may automatically revert back to series creator James Cameron, Flemming reports.

Connor is, of course, the main hero, played by a variety of actors through the films. He leads the human Resistance forces against their cyborg overlords run by the evil Skynet. These include the hard-to-kill cyborgs known as Terminators, famously played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Both the Ellison kids have made names for themselves as Hollywood producers. According to the New York Times, Megan "got access to much larger sums from her father"last year, while David raised $350 million and borrowed more for his own production company.

But this is Megan's year to shine.

She was a major source of funding for two of this year's Oscar contenders, "The Master" and "Zero Dark Thirty," via her movie production company Annapurna Productions, earning her the nickname "The Indie Saver," 

She's also reportedly cooking up a movie about WikiLeaks, too.

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Larry Ellison's Oracle Team has been found guilty of spying on the Italian team by an international jury of sailing experts, reports Julia Prodis Sulek at the Mercury News.

The penalty shouldn't hurt too much: they have to give up five days of practice and pay a $15,000 fine. That couch change for billionaire Ellison, one of the world's richest men with a net worth of about $41 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Plus, as Sulek notes, spying is almost standard practice for the America's Cup tournament, as everyone tries to gather intel on the competition. Even so, the Oracle team was found to have taken it a little too far with Italy's Luna Rossa 72-foot catamaran in New Zealand waters in November. Oracle's team apparently violated the rule that forbids competitors to sail within 200 meters of each other.

The loss of five days hurts the team more than the fine. They already lost a lot of practice days after the catamaran capsized in San Francisco Bay during a practicing session in October.

The $8 million boat was so badly damaged in that accident that the crew turned a big chunk of it into an airplane of sorts and entered it into a crazy event called the called Flugtag. That's where people launch handmade flying contraptions off a 30-foot-tall platform to see how long they'll fly before hitting the water.

Don't miss: Guess When These 20 Sci-Fi Technologies Are Coming To Your Phone Or PC

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If you'd founded a tech company worth billions of dollars, what would you do with your cash?

That's a high-class problem faced by the moguls on this list.

Naturally, many of them buy expensive things, like cars, houses, planes—even islands.

But even if you're Larry Ellison, with a seemingly endless appetite for that stuff, there comes a time when you want to do more.

Maybe it's solving the world's problems, or just indulging in a geeky fantasy.

Larry Ellison: Anti-aging

Oracle cofounder and CEO Larry Ellison is known for pet projects like running the America's Cup sailboat race series, buying homes on Malibu's "Billionaire's Beach," and turning the Hawaiian island of Lanai into a sustainable living lab.

But he says his biggest philanthropic endeavor is medicine.

"I have a medical foundation called, very creatively, the Ellison Medical Foundation," Ellison said in an interview at the D: All Things Digital conference last year. "We are focused on diseases related to aging—I mean, for obvious reasons." (Ellison is now 68.)

Ellison spent about $1 billion on this foundation.

Bill Gates: High-tech toilets

Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Microsoft cofounder is working on a lot of social issues in health, education, and agriculture.

But one problem that really caught Gates' attention is ... poop. The foundation sponsored a "Reinvent the Toilet" fair. Gates himself judged the entries and announced the winners. 

He was looking for methods "for capturing and processing human waste and transforming it into useful resources," Gates said in a blog post announcing the winners.

Paul Allen: Brain research, sports teams, and collectibles

Paul Allen, Microsoft's other billionaire cofounder, also has a long list of pet projects that includes owning multiple pro sports teams, building a rock-and-roll museum, collecting vintage WWII planes, and more.

He's also invested a half billion dollars into the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Its mission is to figure out exactly how the brain works and how to solve diseases like Alzheimer's, which his mother suffered from.

Another goal of the institute is to replicate the brain and build machines with human intelligence.

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Oracle this week explained its plans to push into the $72 billion cloud-computing market.

During a phone call with reporters on Monday, Oracle president Mark Hurd gave more detail on the plan the company had first unveiled on January 15.

Oracle is trying to grab a slice of the "infrastructure-as-a-service" (IaaS) market away from Amazon, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, IBM, and others.

Cloud computing is a vast market, involving software apps, storage, computing power, and other resources. The infrastructure part of cloud usually involves providing the basic computing resources on which customers can run operating systems and software of their choosing.

Oracle's scheme is completely different from the way most companies approach IaaS.

Oracle will install its high-end hardware, which it calls "engineered systems," loaded with Oracle software in a customer's data center. The customer doesn't share those systems with others—a differentiator from most cloud setups. It pays a monthly fee to rent them. This is often called a "private cloud"—but involving hardware, not just software.

It's a bold plan for Oracle. And a smart one, longtime Oracle watcher Rick Sherlund of Nomura Securities told Business Insider.

"You've got [Salesforce.com CEO Marc] Benioff on the one hand, saying Oracle doesn't get the cloud and Oracle saying hold on a second, a lot of mission-critical applications might be better behind the firewall, in a private cloud setting," he said. "In that environment, Oracle has a lot of strengths."

Sherlund is referring to a long-standing feud between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff which dates back to 2011. That's when Benioff called Oracle's products “the false cloud" and Ellison called Salesforce.com “the roach motel of clouds.”

Benioff was right in some ways. Oracle can't offer its software in the same manner as Salesforce.com. Its software was built before clouds, when companies didn't share software or hardware, a concept called "multi-tenancy."

"Oracle can't do what Salesforce.com has done and create multi-tenancy apps out of on-premise apps that were never designed for multi-tenancy," Sherlund said. "Faced with that obstacle, Oracle redefines the problem."

Oracle's customers could very well love this. Most enterprises are starting to experiment with cloud computing, but they won't trust their most important data and databases to it. After all, Amazon is known to go down fairly frequently.

The pay-as-you-go scheme isn't really cheaper for companies, much as leasing a car isn't always a cheaper deal than buying it. Oracle customers must sign a three-year deal and they'll pay 80% of the list price for the hardware, plus pay for the software and a monthly usage fee on top of that, reports InformationWeek's Doug Henschen.

But they won't have to come up with millions of dollars up front, which may attract some.

Don't miss: How 15 Tech Tycoons Spend Their Fortunes

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How do you top buying 97 percent of a Hawaiian island?

Buy a Hawaiian airline to help people get there.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is rumored to be buying Island Air, reports Dave Segal at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, citing two unnamed sources said to be familiar with Ellison's plans.

Island Air is a small airline that specializes in interisland flights, including daily flights to Ellison's island, Lanai.

The airline has confirmed a sale is in process but hasn't announced the buyer. A PR person for the airline told the Pacific Business News that the buyer was an investment firm and hinted that Ellison was not involved.

On the other hand, the airline's former CEO, who left the job on December 31, now works for Ellison's Hawaiian company, Lanai Resorts, Segal reports.

So there are definitely ties between Ellison and the airline.

Owning an airline would be in character. Ellison is himself a pilot who collects planes and his son is a stunt pilot, too.

The population and tourist trade on Lanai is booming since Ellison purchased the island. The five daily ferry boats between Lanai and its closest neighbor, Maui, are packed. As the island prospers, transportation to it will become an ever bigger issue.

Oracle had no comment on Ellison's potential purchase of Island Air.

SEE ALSO: 10 Reasons You Wish You Were Larry Ellison

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Larry Ellison just added another prize possession to his personal portfolio: his own Hawaiian airline.

As we previously reported, Ellison was considering buying Island Air to help people get to Lanai, the Hawaiian Island he owns. Today, the sale became official; terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Buying an airline is a very Ellison-like thing to do. Ellison is a pilot who collects planes. His son is a stunt pilot, too.

And when the fabulously wealthy CEO of Oracle isn't running his company, he spends a lot of his time collecting extravagent things, like mansions, yachts and golf courses.

An island

Ellison bought 98 percent of the Hawaiian island, Lanai, a part of the state of Hawaii that was sale for between $500 and $600 million.

He's turning it into an eco-friendly experiment, building out its resorts and sustainable farms.

A gigantic mansion in Woodside, Calif.

His flagship mansion was styled to look like a feudal Japanese village. It has a two-acre man made lake. 

The house is worth about $110 million.

He also owns a gigantic golf course

Ellison owns a 249 acre estate in Rancho Mirage, California known as Porcupine Creek. It includes a private golf course.

It cost him $42.9 million.

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Larry Ellison threw his barbs at IBM today when announcing Oracle's first "mainframe" class computer server, called the M5.

This is the fastest computer Oracle has ever produced. Oracle also introduced a new mid-range computer, the T5.

Both of these products are built with a new Oracle-designed microprocessor, the SPARC T5.

Ellison had IBM in his sights as he talked about the M5 and T5. Ellison said that in some of its tests, the M5 was 8-times faster than IBM's 795 and cost 80 percent less.

"You can go faster, but only if you are willing to pay 80% less," he joked.

He also said that Oracle's new mid-range server, the T5, is 9 times faster than IBM's P780. Oracle published these statistics on its website and showed this slide during today's press conference:

We'll see how well these claims sit with IBM.

In 2012, IBM forced Oracle to pull ads that claimed Oracle's Exadata computers were 20x faster than IBM's products.

Even if IBM doesn't buy the claims, Oracle needs its customers to believe them.

For months, Ellison promised that the hardware business would stop shrinking by February and start growing by May.

But when Oracle announced its latest quarter last week that didn't happen. It had another big year-over-year decline in revenue for the hardware business, down by 23 percent.

One reason for the decline was that Oracle's customers were waiting for the new products  announced today, Ellison told Wall Street analysts on a conference call.

Now the products are out and we'll see if Oracle can make them – and its whole hardware business – a success.

SEE ALSO: WHO'S HIRING? These 10 Tech Companies Have The Most Job Openings

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Larry Ellison is selling his 9,242 square foot Lake Tahoe home for $28.5 million.

The house sits on 2.62 acres. It has six-bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a soundproofed media room, a fitness room, and billboard room. There are two piers, a lakefront hot tub, and "230 feet of picturesque white sandy beach and shoreline," according to the listing. There is also a guest house.

Ellison is selling the property because he's building a new home elsewhere in Lake Tahoe. One that's three times bigger.

He rebuilt this property "from the studs up," according to a press release on the sale of the home.

Some of the features he added are "a fully heated driveway and entry, heated patios and walkways, wall-to-wall pocket glass doors, humidifying system, security system, guardhouse, and park-like landscaping with granite boulders and water features."

We have photos of the property from the real estate agent selling the property, Jennie Fairchild.

Here's a panoramic view of the home

One of the many fireplaces in the home.

A view of the shoreline.

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Billionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is selling one of his many mansions. But it's not because he's become practical. It's because he's building a property that's three times bigger, says the WSJ.

Ellison's 2.62 acre, 9,000+ square-foot Lake Tahoe home is on the market for $28.5 million. It took him three years to build and includes a sound-proof screening room and Japanese soaking tubs in the master suite. There are six bedrooms and 8.5 baths.

The new house will be a 7.6 acre property. 

Larry Ellison is known for collecting mansions. He has a few on Malibu's Carbon Beach, one in Newport, Rhode Island, and of course Porcupine Creek.

Here's his real estate portfolio, and here are big, gorgeous photos of his $28.5 million home that's on the market.

SEE ALSO: Larry Ellison Is Selling This $28.5 Million Lake Tahoe House

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With great wealth comes great responsibility.

That's how we judge the tycoons of tech. While many of them spend their money on expensive luxuries, like cars, houses, planes — even islands — they are also expected to use their prosperity to do good works.

That's the implicit demand of the tech industry.

Some are astoundingly generous, giving tens of millions —even hundreds of millions — to their favorite causes. How much they give says a lot about them. Which causes they support does, too.

SEE ALSO: MISSING OUT ON BILLIONS: These 10 People Made Some Of The Saddest Choices In Tech History

Larry Ellison: A cure for aging

Larry Ellison is known for his extravagant lifestyle filled with cars, airplanes, mansions, even a Hawaiian Island. But he's a big philanthropist, too, giving to his own Ellison Medical Foundation.

Ellison jokes about it: "We are focused on diseases related to aging—I mean, for obvious reasons." (He's 69.)

But it's no joke. He's trying to cure diseases like Alzheimer's and arthritis. And he's generous. The foundation awarded 70 new grants, giving away $46.5-million last year alone, reports Philanthropy.com

Bill Gates: Improving life everywhere, especially below the waist

Through a $3.3 billion donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Microsoft cofounder is trying to fix lots of the world's problems. He's eradicating polio, trying to end poverty, improving education.

But some of his causes are more fundamental. For instance he's working on better ways to dispose of poop. The foundation sponsored a "Reinvent the Toilet" fair with the winners picked by him.

He's also offering $100,000 to anyone who can make a condom people actually like to use.

Paul Allen: Replicating the human brain

Paul Allen, Microsoft's other billionaire cofounder, is also known for an extravagant lifestyle that includes owning multiple pro sports teams, massive collections, building music museums.

He's invested a half billion dollars into the Allen Institute for Brain Science. It will study how the brain works with a goal of curing diseases like Alzheimer's, an illness his mother suffered from. And ultimately, institute has another goal: to replicate the brain and build machines with human intelligence.

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Larry Ellison, is one of the most outrageous, outspoken personalities in the tech industry.

And he has been for years.

He's held the CEO role at Oracle since 1977. That makes him the longest-running tech CEO in Silicon Valley history.

And that certainly gives him the right to have opinions on just about everything.

Cloud computing: "Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about."

In September, 2008, Larry Ellison completely dissed cloud computing while speaking at an analyst conference. He said:

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. ... The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

Cloud computing: "I'm not gonna fight this thing."

At that same conference, he also admitted that Oracle would start selling cloud services, too.

"We'll make cloud computing announcements because, you know, if orange is the new pink, we'll make orange blouses. I mean, I'm not gonna fight this thing. .. well, maybe we'll do an ad. Uh, I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing, other than market ... you know, change the wording on some of our ads."

Cloud Computing: SaaS was really his idea and Marc Benioff stole it.

"I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, 'We're going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.' Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it," Ellison said at the 2012 AllThingsD's D10 conference.

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Larry Ellison threw a big, private bash on Wednesday night to celebrate the run-up to the America's Cup race that begins in July.

The highlight of the party was the premier of a documentary called "The Wind Gods: 33rd America’s Cup,” produced by Skydance Productions.

That's Ellison’s son, David's company. (Both of Ellison's children are movie moguls. His daughter, Megan Ellison, was a producer for "Zero Dark Thirty." Megan and David are also said to be working on a new "Terminator" movie. )

And because one-is-never-enough, the party also launched a new book that also documents Ellison's America's Cup win called “The Billionaire and the Mechanic,” written by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Julian Guthrie.

The party was a red carpet affair complete with multi-beam searchlights and an announcer, reports the San Francisco Business Times' Patrick Hoge.

But our favorite story of the night was how Ellison prevented a Mercury News reporter from being tossed out because she tried to speak to him.

UPDATED: We've confirmed that it was Merc enterprise beat reporter Julia Prodis Sulek who is also covering the America's Cup.

As Sulek was being forced out, litterally yanked by her arm, a smiling Ellison intervened. He reached out, grabbed the handler and demanded the reporter be released, pronto, Sulek told. He then turned and talked to Sulek.

Sulek tweeted that night about talking to Ellison.

Will Larry Ellison crew on his #Americascup Oracle catamaran? "I'm trying to get in shape," he told me tonight. If he does, he will.

— Julia Prodis Sulek (@juliasulek) May 9, 2013

SEE ALSO: The Most Controversial And Entertaining Things Larry Ellison Has Ever Said

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Oracle co-President Mark Hurd, who's busy revamping Oracle's sales force, has officially joined Twitter, as @MarkVHurd.

Hurd hasn't tweeted yet.

As of Friday evening East Coast time, Hurd had 78 followers — most of them Oracle employees — and was following 67 other Twitter users.

Hurd played tennis at his alma mater Baylor University, and he's following the team on Twitter. But as of Friday, he wasn't yet following his boss, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. 

Jill Rowley, a "social sales evangelist" who joined Oracle in April in its acquisition of Eloqua, was first to welcome Hurd to Twitter on Friday: 

Welcome to Twitter @markvhurd! Our customers are looking forward to your insights. #SocialSelling#SocialBusiness#Transformation @oracle

— Jill Rowley (@jill_rowley) May 24, 2013

Ellison, who joined Twitter last June, has himself only tweeted once. "Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020," Ellison said in his only tweet since joining. 

But at least Ellison has a Twitter account. Safra Catz, Oracle's other co-president, doesn't have one. Neither does SAP CEO Bill McDermott. There are at least 25 parody accounts for Steve Ballmer, but he's not on Twitter either. Meg Whitman's last tweet was in October 2011. 

It seems like top enterprise execs feel like there's more to be lost on Twitter than there is to be gained. 

We reached out to Oracle for comment on Hurd's arrival to Twitter, but haven't heard back. But a source told us his account has been set up for about three or four months — he's just been too busy to start using it. 

That makes sense since Hurd, after Oracle's disappointing earnings last quarter, has vowed to streamline the company's salesforce, which has added some 4,000 new members in the last year and a half. 

SEE ALSO: A Google Engineer Who Loves Annoying Microsoft Says He's Found A New Windows 7 And 8 Bug

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When his Oracle Team USA won the America's Cup sailing race in 2010, entrepreneur and sailing aficionado Larry Ellison earned the right to choose the rules for this year's competition.

Ellison has taken the opportunity to screw up America's favorite sailing race.

By selecting an especially expensive, complicated, and fast type of boat — a 72-foot catamaran called the AC72 — Ellison has effectively made the 2013 Cup too costly for many competitors, the New York Times reported today.

The competition is set to begin on July 4, and only four teams are signed up. That's fewer than in any modern America's Cup, and far fewer than the 15 teams race organizers had predicted would compete, according to the Times. There are usually between 7 and 13 teams. That's not even enough boats for us to bother spending time building a photo slideshow about. 

Each team, with the exception of New Zealand's, is backed by an individual billionaire, and each has spent between $65 million and $100 million so far.

The chief executive of Ellison's Oracle Team USA, Russell Coutts, noted Ellison reduced the crew size for the boats to 11 members, from 17, as a way to control costs.

The Swedish team, Artemis, has not announced whether or not it will compete come July. On May 9, its catamaran capsized while practicing in San Francisco Bay, killing sailor Andrew "Bart" Simpson.

This week, Olympic champion sailor Sir Ben Ainslie, who was a friend of Simpson's and sails for Ellison's team, called for a review of the Cup's rules.

"We need to look at some of the rules to try to increase the safety of those boats, the AC72 class, and we're going through that process right now," he said, according to the Daily Mail.

The America's Cup is the world's oldest active race, and is not held on a set schedule. The reigning champion has the right to choose the location of the next race and the type of boat that will be used.

A spokesperson for Ellison told the Times the high-speed, high-tech AC72 boats were chosen because they would make the race more exciting for a television audience. The location, San Francisco Bay, was chosen for the same reason.

But even that choice looks like it is backfiring. The lack of competitors (who sail against each other for the right to challenge Ellison's team for the Cup) means the event could be abbreviated, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

With fewer racing days, the city might not even make back the money it has spent to host the race. In protest, more than 4,000 people have signed a petition on Causes.com calling on Ellison to cover any debt the city incurs. 

SEE ALSO: See Our Incredible Race Around New York City On A 40-Foot Yacht

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In the world of enterprise tech, some execs are more vital to a company's success than others. 

Execs in this upper echelon are exceedingly difficult to replace. If they left, their companies would face an uncertain, scary transitional period. It might take years for a company to recover. 

Tech visionaries and engineering types are obviously represented  in this list.

But some execs we chose based on other factors like leadership, experience and the company's ability to withstand major changes at the moment. 

We've identified nine execs whose companies would beg them to stay if they turned in their resignation letters. We're not including startup founders, since their departures would, in many cases, make it tough for a company to continue getting funding. 

SEE ALSO: 14 Big Data Startups You're Going To Be Hearing A Lot More About

Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO

Year Joined: 2004

Why He'd Be Tough To Replace: He's a cloud visionary and a big reason why Amazon Web Services, which lets customers buy access to cloud servers, storage and apps, is such a roaring success.

Vogels is also an expert in getting cloud tech to scale to millions of users. He spent 10 years honing his skills as a research scientist in Cornell University's computer science department. 

In Vogels' view, enterprises need to be more like startups and just dive into the cloud and start figuring it out. 

"The key is to experiment often and fail quickly," Vogels said at a tech event in London last April. "In the past some of these experiments were very expensive, and often the budget associated with them was sufficient to kill any new idea. But in the cloud, these price tags have been reduced significantly."

Amazon has plenty of cloud talent, but Vogels' brand of visionary thinking doesn't grow on trees.  

Martin Casado, Chief Networking Architect at VMware

Year Joined: 2012

Why He'd Be Tough To Replace: Casado was founder and CTO of Nicira, a startup that VMware paid $1.2 billion to acquire last year.

Nicira focused on software defined networking (SDN), a tech that turns the high-end features in network switches and routers into software that can run on cheap hardware.

SDN is a big threat to networking vendors like Cisco and Juniper. And Casado basically invented OpenFlow, the tech that makes SDN work.

He's holding one of the most important roles at VMware right now because VMware needs someone to explain to customers why SDN is something they can't live without. 

Rebecca Jacoby, CIO and SVP of Cisco's Cloud & Systems Management Technology Group

Year Joined: 1995

Why She'd Be Tough To Replace: Jacoby holds down two big roles at Cisco. In addition to CIO, she also leads Cisco's Cloud & Systems Management Technology Group.

She's leading Cisco's efforts to get more market share in cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), where customers rent hardware and tools to maintain the hardware; and platform-as-a-service, where they rent everything but the app.

Cisco CEO John Chambers has said Jacoby is one of five Cisco execs with CEO potential. “Rebecca is one of the most talented leaders in the company," Chambers told Rachael King of CIO Journal last November. 

Oracle has got some big news to share next week, CEO Larry Ellison told Wall Street analysts during the company's quarterly conference call on Thursday.

Then he went on to spill quite a few beans about it.

"Next week we will be announcing technology partnerships with the largest and most important SaaS companies and infrastructure companies in the cloud," he said.

These companies will be "committing to our technology for years to come" and these "partnerships will reshape the cloud," Ellison said. 

We got the impression that this news will be centered on the Oracle 12c, a brand new kind of database announced last October, where the "c" stands for cloud.

The Oracle 12c is a "multitenant" database, meaning it is designed to be used and shared by multiple companies. That's very different than the traditional Oracle database, which is used by one company.

We think this announcement is about the Oracle 12c because that's what he was talking about when he mentioned the upcoming partnerships.

He even went on to name Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Microsoft.

It's not clear, of course, what they'll be signing on to do. Maybe they'll be signing on to use 12c in their clouds, but it could be less dramatic than that. Maybe they are simply agreeing to work with 12c in some form.

It's not surprising NetSuite would partner with Oracle. Larry Ellison cofounded the company and still owns a sizeable stake in it.

Salesforce is more surprising. Ellison was also an investor in Salesforce.com, cofounded by his former employee Marc Benioff. The two still respect each other, but their relationship has been strained in recent years as they found their companies competing.

Microsoft would be the most surprising. It has its own database, SQL Server, and Microsoft uses its own tech in its own cloud. But the two are not arch enemies. They have partnered on numerous occasions over the years.

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