Although Oracle's overall business grew, investors saw a lot to concern them in Oracle's earnings released yesterday. The stock is down about 8% today.

In talking to Wall Street analysts on a conference call Thursday, Larry Ellison went on the offensive, saying that Oracle is doing way better than competitors SAP and Workday.

The thing that's worrying investors the most is that new software licenses and cloud software subscriptions grew by a meager 1%, even though Oracle said it added 500 new cloud customers last quarter.

That could mean that the software vendor is having trouble getting into the cloud computing game.

It's hardware business is still shrinking, too, down 13% from the year-ago quarter.

Oracle executives blamed a poor economy in Asia and unfavorable currency conversions and insisted it wasn't a lack of interest in Oracle products.

Then Larry Ellison smack-talked about his competitors SAP and Workday. He said that Oracle's cloud is on a "$1 billion run rate" which makes it "bigger than SAP and Workday combined."

He also took a shot at SAP's database, HANA. SAP wants its customers to yank out their Oracle databases and use HANA instead.

"We virtually never see HANA in the market and SAP's HANA numbers simply don't add up," Ellison said. He was referring to the report by Peter Goldmacher of Cowen and Co. that questioned HANA's growth numbers.

A SAP spokesperson had a harsh response to Ellison's claims:

"These boasts are about as credible as Oracle promises about its hardware business over the past years. It’s a weak attempt to distract from the ongoing lack of growth. These numbers may speak for themselves, but other numbers, such as SAP’s 21 percent growth in software + cloud revenues in our most recent calendar year vs. Oracle's 4 percent growth, speak louder and with greater relevance."

SEE ALSO: Here's Steve Jobs Giving The Best Advice On Success And Failure

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HONOLULU (Reuters) - Billionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison may be interested in acquiring a second Hawaii airline after he bought most of the tropical island of Lanai last year.

Island Air, a Honolulu-based carrier with a handful of island-hopping planes that Ellison bought in February, confirmed discussions between Island and Phoenix-based Mesa Air Group, the parent company of Hawaii's interisland go! Airlines.

"We are committed to building a strong regional airline and part of that process is exploring all options including discussions with Mesa Air," Island Air Chief Executive Officer Paul Casey said in a one-sentence statement.

Honolulu's Star-Advertiser newspaper reported on Thursday that Ellison was arranging to take control of go! Airlines, citing an unnamed source familiar with the deal.

Mesa CEO Jonathan Ornstein was not immediately available for comment. A spokeswoman said the airline flies 40 flights a day in Hawaii using a fleet of five 50-seat CRJ-200 jets.

Oracle declined to comment.

Hawaii aviation historian Peter Forman said a deal for Island Air to purchase go! would not only secure more flights for Ellison's island of Lanai, but also could indicate that Ellison intends to become a player in the Hawaiian airline market.

Many industry observers have expected another airline to enter Hawaii to compete with Hawaiian Airlines for the tourist- rich interisland market. Combining go! and Island Air would give Ellison critical mass and a platform from which to compete.

"He's gaining the recognition that he is serious about becoming the second interisland airline in Hawaii. There has been a vacuum for serious competition to Hawaiian (Airlines)," Forman said.

In March 2013, Forbes Magazine listed Ellison, 68, as the world's fifth richest man, and the third richest American, with a net worth of $43 billion.

Ellison bought 98 percent of the 141-square-mile (365-square-km) island of Lanai, Hawaii's sixth-largest island, from billionaire David Murdock in June for an undisclosed price. He said he intended to turn the island into a "laboratory" for green living.

Ellison's Lanai holdings include two resorts and golf courses, a variety of commercial and residential structures, as well as vast acres of undeveloped former pineapple land. The island has roughly 3,000 residents.

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Lisa Shumaker)

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As promised, Oracle and Salesforce.com announced a new partnership today. This is a big get for Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

It's a massive nine-year deal in which Salesforce.com agreed to buy a whole bunch of Oracle's software and hardware for an undisclosed sum.

Although Ellison was an early investor in Salesforce.com, Ellison had a much-publicized strained relationship with Salesforce's cofounder and CEO Marc Benioff  in recent years. The two companies are increasingly becoming competitors.

Benioff had been making noise like he would ditch Oracle's software altogether. His company was inching up its use of an alternative open-source database called PostgreSQL, looking to hire an army of PostgreSQL's developers last year.

Now Benioff has done an about-face and agreed to keep using Oracle's database, other bits of Oracle software, and to adopt Ellison's pride-and-joy Exadata engineered hardware systems.

These engineered systems, which are fine-tuned to run Oracle software really quickly, are the reason that Ellison bought Sun Microsystems in the first place, Ellison has said.

Since that purchase, Oracle's hardware business revenues have been steadily plummeting. Ellison says these lost revenues are part of his plan because he's shaving off Sun's low-end, low-margin commodity hardware business to focus on the high-margin engineered systems. But he also promised that hardware revenues would start to grow by last quarter, which didn't happen. He's now predicting a turnaround next quarter.

Having Salesforce as a hardware customer should help Oracle convince other enterprises to buy Oracle hardware.

Salesforce also agreed to standardize on Oracle's flavor of the Linux operating system. That's interesting because Oracle's Linux is actually a version of Red Hat's Linux and Salesforce was previously a big Red Hat customer. So score another point for Ellison.

But there was something noticeably absent from the announcement. The press release made no mention Oracle's fancy new cloud database, called Oracle 12c. Ellison had heavily hinted that this agreement with Salesforce would involve 12c when he discussed the new partnership last week with Wall Street analysts.

We asked Oracle if Salesforce was planning on using 12c, but the company declined to comment.

As we also predicted, the agreement included plans to make Oracle's cloud to "integrate" with Salesforce's cloud, though the companies were tight-lipped on what that would mean for their customers. Presumably, it means that a customer's data will be able to be more easily shared between the two clouds. They did say that Salesforce agreed to become a customer of Oracle's human resources and financial/accounting clouds.

So what is Salesforce getting out of all this? Probably a great deal on a lot of expensive hardware and software. Salesforce just hired Oracle's previous head of sales, Keith Block. He certainly knows his way around a contract negotiation with his old employer.

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Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison threw a press conference Thursday to explain in more detail their huge, new decade-long partnership.

We now know that Benioff is getting three big things out of the deal:

1. It'll cut Salesforce.com database server costs "in half," Benioff said on the call.

2. Salesforce.com and Oracle apps will be knit together. This could give Salesforce.com an "in" with Oracle customers. "You press a button and suddenly that integration gets loaded and the apps start sharing data and work together," is how Ellison described it.

3. Oracle has agreed to be a Salesforce.com customer, at least as far as acquisitions are concerned. "Virtually every time we buy a company, they are running Salesforce.com's CRM," Ellison explained. "In the old days, we would slide them onto our Fusion salesforce app right away. Now, we'll leave some of those companies on Salesforce.com."

The deal was formally announced yesterday after Ellison spilled some of the beans about it during his quarterly conference call with analysts last week. Oracle was reporting a rare consecutive miss on revenue and Ellison wanted to show the analysts that big deals were in the pipeline.

It's easy to see what Oracle is getting. Salesforce has agreed to buy a whole bunch of Oracle technology, including Oracle's new cloud database known as Oracle 12c; Oracle's Exadata hardware that runs the database; and Oracle's flavor of Linux (which means Salesforce is abandoning Red Hat).

The deal is supposed to run for at least nine years, although Benioff said on today's conference call that it would last 12 years.

At one point, an estimated deal value of about $300 million was bandied about by JMP securities analyst Pat Walravens. (We've contacted Walravens and asked him if he he still thinks the deal is worth this much.)

The deal also means Benioff won't be cutting his database costs by ditching Oracle for a free and open-source database called PostgreSQL. It looked like Salesforce was moving that way last year, when it revealed plans to hire an army of PostgreSQL developers last year.

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Tech millionaires and billionaires vacation a little differently from the rest of us.

Many, like Larry Ellison, have an assortment of homes to choose from all over the world. 

Some, like Mark Zuckerberg, vacation like regular people despite having deep pockets.

Additional reporting for this story was done by Andrea Huspeni.

Bill Gates recently purchased an $8.7 million vacation pad in Florida. It's 4.8 acres and has a 20-stall horse barn for his daughter, who is a horseback rider.

Google's Eric Schmidt is hunting for a home in London. But in the meantime, he owns Ellen DeGeneres' old house, which he acquired in 2007 for $20 million.

Source: Financial Times

The master suite is 1,300 square feet and takes up an entire floor. It's a 4-acre estate with beautiful gardens.

Three of Larry Ellison's racing sailboats placed a five-pound weight in the wrong spot, a rule violation that has caused them to give back two previous seasons of championship trophies, reports the San Francisco's Chronicle's Tom Fitzgerald.

Oracle Team USA made the confession on Friday that it did break the rules. The company is voluntarily giving up its championships, it said.

The overall weight of each boat was correct, but the rules governing weights are fanatically detailed. Where teams place weights is as important as how much overall weight they add to a boat because the placement of the weights can affect how a boat handles, reports FitzGerald.

Just to give you an idea, we're talking about the misplacement of 5 pounds on a boat that weighs about 12,500 pounds.

The boats involved were the previous racing sailboats, known as AC45s, a class of 45-foot yachts. The current boats are the AC72. AC45s are now only used for training, according to a statement by the Oracle team. But until this year, they were the boats being used in the America's Cup World Series regattas.

The Oracle teams says that it's not a bunch of cheaters and that it didn't deliberately put the 5-pound weights in the wrong spot. Team employees moved the weight over a year ago "without the knowledge of management or the skippers," the statement says.

Still, it's another black eye to Ellison's team in a racing season marred with setbacks. The Oracle team was also fined three practice days earlier this year over a spying violation in New Zealand. A sailor for the Artemis team, Andrew "Bart" Simpson, died in the San Francisco Bay this summer after a practice session with Oracle. Last fall, during a practice season, Ellison's team wrecked one of the boats, too.

SEE ALSO: Larry Ellison's Wrecked $8 Million Yacht Is Reborn As An Airplane

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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will appear on CBS "This Morning" tomorrow with Charlie Rose to talk about the NSA and other tech topics.

In the pre-recorded interview, Rose asked Ellison how he thinks Apple will fare without Steve Jobs.

Ellison appears to say Apple won't do well without Jobs, although not in so many words. Here's a snippet from the interview's transcript:

CHARLIE ROSE: Let's talk about Steve Jobs. What is it about him? You — we recognize the fact that he loved Apple and he wanted to make Apple great and he did. But what was it about him that enabled him to do it, other than he worked hard?

LARRY ELLISON: He was — he was brilliant. I mean, our Edison. He was our Picasso. He was an incredible inventor.

CHARLIE ROSE: So what happens to Apple without Steve?

LARRY ELLISON: Well, we already know.

CHARLIE ROSE: What?

LARRY ELLISON: We saw — we conducted the experiment. I mean, it's been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we're gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs.

That's some pretty vague language, so what the heck does that mean?

It sounds like Ellison is referring to the last time Jobs was away from Apple, following his ouster in 1985. That was the beginning of Apple's great decline in the late 80s and early 90s. It wasn't until Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 that things started to turn around again. 

Ellison and Jobs were close friends. If anyone has insight into the way Jobs worked at Apple, it's him.

You can watch the clip here.

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Outspoken Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is not a fan of Google CEO Larry Page.

Oracle and Google have been fighting in court for years. Ellison believes Google is willfully infringing on Oracle's patents for Android. 

A jury determined that Google hadn't violated any Oracle patents, but Ellison doesn't seem to agree with the jury.

In an interview with Charlie Rose at CBS, Ellison accused Google of stealing Oracle's tools to make Android happen.

He said Larry Page is acting evil. 

Here's the transcript from CBS:

LARRY ELLISON: I think most of-- the only problem-- guys I have trouble with are the Google guys.

CHARLIE ROSE: Really?

LARRY ELLISON: Yeah.

CHARLIE ROSE: So Larry and Sergey you have trouble with?

LARRY ELLISON: Larry specifically. Larry-- I-- I think-- I--

CHARLIE ROSE: Larry per se?

LARRY ELLISON: Yeah, Larry per se.

CHARLIE ROSE: Why?

LARRY ELLISON: 'Cause-- he makes the decisions over there. He run-- he runs that company. No one else runs that company. And they decided-- let me very clear. They-- when you program-- when you write a program for the android phone, you write it. You-- you use the Oracle tool-- Oracle Java tools for everything. And at the very end, you press a button and said, "Convert this to Android format." We don't compete with Google. We don't do anything Google does. We-- we just think they took our stuff and-- and that was-- and that was wrong. That's a completely separate issue.

CHARLIE ROSE: But, I mean, do you think they're evil?

LARRY ELLISON: I think what they did was-- was-- absolutely evil.

CHARLIE ROSE: And you blame Larry Page?

LARRY ELLISON: Abs-- 100% Larry Page.

CHARLIE ROSE: So if what they did is evil, that makes Larry Page evil?

LARRY ELLISON: No, it makes what he did evil. Which is quite different. And I know his slogan is "Don't be evil."

CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly, that's what I'm talking about.

LARRY ELLISON: And I think he slipped up this one time. But-- the--

CHARLIE ROSE: So he's a good guy except this one time when he--

LARRY ELLISON: This really bothers me. I don't-- I don't see how he thinks you can just copy someone else's stuff. It really-- it really bothers me.

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Larry Ellison described what it was like watching his close friend Steve Jobs die in an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS.

CBS passed along a transcript of Ellison's comments:

CHARLIE ROSE: Did you watch him die?

LARRY ELLISON: Oh, close. Was I there at the last moments?

CHARLIE ROSE: No, did you watch him go through this?

LARRY ELLISON: You know, I-- I-- I'd go over there all the time. And the walks-- we'd always go for walks. We'd always go for walks. And the walks just kept getting shorter. Until near the end we'd kind of walk around the block or maybe-- maybe four blocks, something like that. And you just watched him getting weaker. And this is the strongest guy I knew. This was absolutely the strongest, most willful person I have ever met. And after seven years, the cancer even wore him out. And that's was what it was. He was just tired of fighting. Tired of the pain. And he decided, shocked Lorraine, shocked everybody that the medication was gonna stop. He just pulled off the meds-- I think on a Saturday or a Sunday. And by the following Wednesday he-- he was gone.

CHARLIE ROSE: If you love someone it's hard to see them do that, though it's their choice.

LARRY ELLISON: Yeah, it had reached the point where he was definitely suffering. It's just so much pain.

CHARLIE ROSE: There is no other Steve Jobs?

LARRY ELLISON: No. My eulogy began, you know, I guess we're all told that no one's irreplaceable. I don't believe that. I just don't.

CHARLIE ROSE: Well said.

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The full interview between Charlie Rose of CBS News and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is out now.

Ellison touches on a variety of tech topics like NSA spying, but he also talks about his old friend Steve Jobs.

Last night, CBS released a partial transcript of the interview. In it, Ellison hinted that he didn't think Apple will do well without Jobs.

Now, we have the full transcript and a bit more context. Ellison says that he thinks Jobs is irreplaceable and Apple won't be nearly as successful as it has been now that Jobs is gone.

"I'll say it publicly. He's irreplaceable," Ellison says in the interview. "I don't see how they — how they can — they will not nearly so successful because he's gone."

Here's the full transcript from the portion of the interview where Ellison discusses Apple post-Jobs:

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Larry Ellison is comfortable with the NSA collecting data on us all. He even called the NSA program "essential."

Ellison is one of the world's richest men who got that way by founding and running Oracle, a company that makes a database that stores massive amount of information. Oracle's database is used by nearly every large company on the planet from credit card companies to the government.

Ellison thinks that having the government collect information on citizens is a fair trade off to keeping us more secure, he told Charlie Rose in an interview with CBS This Morning.

He says people should be far more concerned about the data your credit card companies collect on you.

Here's the transcript:

CHARLIE ROSE: Where do you come down on what NSA is doing?

LARRY ELLISON: Well-- great things is we live in a democracy. If we don't like what NSA is doing, we always-- we can just get rid of the government and put in a different government. I think-- (SIGH) actually, we've been collecting this information for so long-- long before NSA was-- collecting it. Let me tell you who was collecting it: American Express, Visa, all of your-- all of your credit card data, all of your financial records. This whole issue of privacy is utterly fascinating to me. Who's ever heard of this information being misused but the government. In what way?

CHARLIE ROSE: Let me just hear you clearly. You were saying whatever the NSA's doin' is okay with me?

LARRY ELLISON: It's great. I wish-- you know, it's great. It's essential. By the way, President Obama thinks it's essential. It's essential if want to minimize the kind of strikes that we just had in Boston. It's absolutely essential.

CHARLIE ROSE: But what point would it be alarming for you, in terms of government surveillance? At what point would your red line be crossed?

LARRY ELLISON: If the government used it to do political targeting. If the Democrats used it to go after Republicans. If the Republicans used it to go after Democrats. In other words, if it became-- if we stop looking for terrorists and we started looking for people with-- on the other side of the aisle.

SEE ALSO: The 50 Most Powerful People In Enterprise Tech

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When Larry Ellison won the America's Cup in 2010 and chose San Francisco to host this year's race, he predicted the event would bring more than $1 billion to the city. 

That prediction looks to have been wildly optimistic.

This year's race has only four teams able to compete against Ellison's expensive new boats. Along with lawsuits, crashes, cheating, disgruntled sponsors and the death of a well respected sailor — the crowds are not arriving as hoped.

The city may actually be forced to pay more $20 million for additional security and beefed up infrastructure, and anti-Cup protesters don't feel they should pay for something so few people enjoy.

None of that changes the fact these boats are changing the way people travel across the water, and technology like this is what Silicon Valley is famous for.

Regardless of the choppy controversy surrounding Team Oracle and the America's Cup this year we wanted to get up-close and personal, and that's exactly what we did when we spent a day with Ellison's sailing team watching how they operate their incredible boats.

Everyone on Larry Ellison's 2013 America's Cup crew must pass the their boss' 2010 trophy-winning USA 17 boat to get into the building.

Even crew workouts are performed beneath the sail from the boat outside. The focus here is on winning September's upcoming race and little else.

Designed specifically for this year's race, two new America's Cup 72 (AC72) boats sit on their carriages farther back into the 1,000-foot-long warehouse.

When you're worth billions, you can buy your way out of just about anything. Well, except for death of course.

Or maybe not.

In a quest to live infinitely, five financiers are heavily funding longevity research, a venture that has become more legitimate in the last 10 years despite the fact that the obsession with immortality is no fresh concept.

Adam Leith Gollner has just written ☺“The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief and Magic Behind Living Forever” and yesterday, Gollner wrote a piece for BookBeast detailing his findings on the bigshots who are determined to stretch their fame and live forever.

Take Larry Ellison for example. Ellison, CEO of Oracle and the fifth-richest person in the world with a net worth of $43 billion, hates death. The idea, he says in the book, that someone can "be there and just vanish, just not be there" doesn't resonate with him.  So instead, he created The Ellison Foundation, dedicated to ending mortality, which gives out more than $40 million a year to fund research. Gollner notes that Ellison’s biographer Mark Wilson believes Ellison sees death as “just another kind of corporate opponent he can outfox.”

Then there's Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov. Itskov founded the 2045 Initiative with the goal of helping humans achieve physical immortality within the next three decades. According to Itskov, all we have to do is make the simple swap between our biological bodies and machine bodies as soon as possible. Our brains will be backed up in cyberspace and we’ll just download ourselves into bionic avatars whenever the mood strikes. Itskov believes we'll be "100% immortal" by 2045, but he doesn't suggest the idea that anyone would want to opt-out of becoming the equivalent of an iOS app.

Also featured is Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel (who is vehemently against higher education), and Santa Barbara-based venture capitalist and investor Paul Glenn, who made contributions to the Methuselah Foundation, whose cofounder Aubrey de Grey claims that “the first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today.”

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Google chairman Eric Schmidt had some choice words for Larry Ellison on Sunday.

In a post to his Google+ account, Schmidt wrote:

We typically try to avoid getting dragged into public battles with other companies. But I’ve gotten a lot of questions about Larry Ellison’s claims that Google “took [Oracle’s] stuff”. It’s simply untrue -- and that’s not just my opinion, but the judgment of a U.S. District Court.

A couple of years ago, Oracle slapped Google with a $1 billion lawsuit claiming Android infringed on its patents and violated copyright law. Last year, Oracle lost the lawsuit. But during an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS earlier this month, Ellison insisted that Google and CEO Larry Page were in the wrong.

He said:

"We don't compete with Google. We don't do anything Google does. We-- we just think they took our stuff and-- and that was-- and that was wrong ... This really bothers me. I don't-- I don't see how he thinks you can just copy someone else's stuff.

Schmidt was, apparently, not content to let that stand, especially when the courts backed Google.

SEE ALSO: The Business App 50: The Best Apps To Help You Do Your Job

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Early last month, sailing's Oracle Team USA confessed to breaking the rules by placing some five-pound weights in the wrong spots on its boat.

Now a jury for the America's Cup has imposed severe penalties on the team, harsher than any in the race's 162-year-old history, reports Reuters Ronnie Cohen.

The jury docked the team two "points" and kicked three people off the team. Oracle also has to pay $250,000 to two charitable foundations.

The America's Cup finals are a series of 17 races. Those two points mean that Oracle will need to win 11 races while its competitor, Emirates Team New Zealand, will only need to win 9.

The boats involved in the scandal are not the same ones racing in the America's Cup finals. These are smaller, 45-foot catamarans used in a previous, qualifying racing series and are now only used for training.

The weights were found when the boats were used for a youth competition this summer. Bags of lead and resin were discovered stuffed into the frames, Cohen reports.

The rules governing weights in the America's Cup are fanatically detailed because the placement of weight can influence the performance of a boat.

The Oracle team said that the overall weight of each boat was correct, performance was not influenced, and that these weights were put there by a team employee "without the knowledge of management or the skippers."

The team then voluntarily gave back the two championship titles won with the boats.

But the jury clearly wasn't satisfied with that. "The incidents are serious and unprecedented in the America's Cup," the jury said in its report.

Despite this latest setback and embarrassment, observers are still expecting an exciting, competitive racing series that begins on Saturday.

SEE ALSO: The 50 Most Powerful People In Enterprise Tech

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Google isn't the only big name in tech working on a "cure" for death, or at least a cure for a lot of the things associated with aging.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Microsoft cofounder and angel investor Paul Allen are all working doing the same.

Peter Thiel, who earned his billions largely thanks to backing Facebook in its early days, finances medical research that could help people live to be 150 years or more. He once said that he doesn't believe that people really, truly have to die.

His Thiel Foundation has supports a bunch of anti-aging projects like Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, which hopes to reverse aging, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIR), which is working on artificial intelligence. His foundation's newest project, called Breakout Labs, funds startups working on radical science technology.

Larry Ellison may be better known for his extravagant lifestyle than his philanthropy, but he is a generous donor, too, particular for medical projects. He has created 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.)

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

Paul Allen, Microsoft's other billionaire cofounder who is also known for an extravagant lifestyle, is interested in curing diseases associated with aging, too.

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.

SEE ALSO: These 15 Tech Billionaires Are Spending Millions To Save The World

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A group of lycra-clad "ninjas" covered the garage of Larry Ellison's San Francisco's home with New Zealand flags at 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday.

The group was was celebrating the near victory of the New Zealand team, which is on the cusp of winning the America's Cup race in San Francisco.

Thursday's race, scheduled for 1:15 p.m. Pacific, could be the final one. New Zealand has won eight races and needs nine to win. Oracle has won three races, and two of those were taken away because of a "two point" punishment slapped onto Oracle's team when it admitted to cheating in the race series that preceded the Cup finals.

The net result is that Oracle now needs to win eight races in a row to pull off the win for the U.S.

The Kiwi's are already starting to party and to rub it into Ellison's nose as best they can. This crew spent hours planning their flag bombing escapade, reports The New Zealand Harold's Dana Johannsen.

Here's the video

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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had about as good a day on Sunday as possible. First, his Oracle USA sailing team won two races, making that four in a row, to keep its hopes alive for winning the America's Cup.

The score is now 8 to 5, New Zealand. The first team to win 9 races wins the Cup and if Ellison's team pulls this off, it will be the most exciting come-back in racing history. Oracle had to win two extra races, a harsh penalty for cheating.

Then, he stood in front of the largest crowd ever to open his company's annual conference, Oracle OpenWorld. The conference has attracted 60,000 people to San Francisco and 2 million online viewers.

So Ellison, always a good speaker, was in particularly high humor Sunday night. He joked about his titanium America's Cup boat and his titanium watch "The watch was a lot cheaper than the boat."

Then, when he launched a new product with the cumbersome name of "The Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance," he cracked the following Steve Jobs-inspired joke. (Jobs was Ellison's best friend.)

"Who was the genius that named this product? You're looking at him. That's why they pay me the big bucks. 'iPhone' heh, big deal, how about this?"

The other three products he launched on Sunday had equally literal names, though Ellison didn't take the credit or the blame for those.

SEE ALSO: Larry Ellison: Oracle's New Products Make Data Fly Around 'At Ungodly Speeds.'

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On Sunday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison launched several new products to kick off Oracle's massive conference going on this week in San Francisco. And on Monday his two biggest competitors are already bristling.

Compared to his typical spiel, Ellison kept the competitor bashing to a minimum during his keynote speech, with one major exception. He showed a slide that said that the new Oracle server is twice as fast and three times cheaper than IBM's server.

The problem is that Oracle has already been busted three times for advertising campaigns claiming that Oracle's servers are faster, better, or cheaper than IBM's.

IBM has complained about these ads to the advertising industry's self-regulation body, the National Advertising Division, and NAB has consistently sided with IBM and told Oracle to change the ads.

When IBM asked NAB to look into the truth of a fourth campaign, NAB threw up its hands and asked The Federal Trade Commission to investigate Oracle's ads for "possible law enforcement action,"it said last month.

To be fair, the latest comparison wasn't technically an ad. It was a slide in Ellison's keynote presentation.

And also to be fair, IBM is a master at complaining to various regulatory agencies to thwart its competitors. That's how it stopped Amazon from winning a game-changing cloud deal with the CIA worth $600 million. Oracle told us in August that it stands by its ads.

On Monday, IBM sent us this response to Ellison's slide:

"Much like its comparative ads, Oracle's presentation failed to provide details on the cost-comparison, which must be analyzed to determine the validity of Oracle's assertion. Oracle has a history of making grandiose claims that are unsubstantiated, but knowing what we have seen in prior comparisons, it would be important to look at exactly what is included in the cost: How much storage and what type was included, what type of maintenance and support was added in, were the very expensive Oracle software licenses added in?"

Meanwhile, Oracle's oldest, biggest rival, SAP, also went on the offensive. One of the products Oracle announced last night was a pretty amazing "in-memory" feature for its latest database, Oracle 12c. The feature instantly makes the database work at least 100 times faster, Ellison says.

The feature offers an alternative for Oracle customers considering ditching Oracle for SAP's HANA in-memory database.

No sooner had Ellison left the stage, than SAP sent us this response to his keynote about the new competitor to HANA, noting that SAP founder and chairman Hasso Plattner launched HANA about two years ago:

"It's great to hear Larry singing from Hasso Plattner's playbook, but Oracle is still missing the mark. They are still trying to make queries run faster but missed the chance to simplify the data management at the same time. SAP HANA has been delivering real-time performance to our customers in real world environments for years."

All of this said, Oracle is putting together a compelling set of products for companies that use the Oracle database, and that's a lot of companies. Oracle has owned about half the database market share, by revenue, for years.

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Oracle Corp CEO Larry Ellison skipped a keynote address at his software company's massive annual customer conference on Tuesday to be on San Francisco Bay as his Oracle Team USA made a comeback in the America's Cup.

Hundreds of Oracle OpenWorld attendees streamed out of San Francisco's Moscone conference center after an Oracle executive announced that Ellison was still on a boat and would not attend the keynote presentation, a focal point of the annual event.

America's Cup sailing is a major passion for Ellison, rivaled only by his focus on expanding what is already the world's third-largest software maker.

Last week, Ellison was absent from Oracle's quarterly earnings conference call with analysts so that he could be close to the racing, which the sailing enthusiast has been viewing from a team speedboat.

In the past, Ellison has used his OpenWorld keynote to attack rival companies and colorfully criticize their products to the delight of attendees.

At least a few of the more than 60,000 people registered to attend this year's OpenWorld were disappointed by Ellison's absence.

"I can understand his dedication to the racing, but it does send an interesting message to the audience here about his priorities," said Mason McDaniel, whose company spent a few thousand dollars in travel expenses to send him from Washington, D.C., to OpenWorld, one of San Francisco's biggest tech conferences.

Oracle Team USA won its seventh straight race on Tuesday and looked set to keep the Cup from rival Emirates Team New Zealand.

The Cup, which has gone on longer than expected due to unfavorable weather, will go to whichever team wins the next race, scheduled for Wednesday.

Oracle Team USA won the America's Cup in Valencia, Spain, in 2010 and with it the right to set the rules for this year's competition, including choosing to hold the regatta on San FranciscoBay.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Ken Wills)

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