Oracle cancels Marc Benioff’s keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld

Just a day before the talk, Oracle canceled the keynote speech of competitor Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com. Benioff was scheduled to talk about cloud computing at the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 conference on Wednesday morning.

But Benioff, in classic fiery fashion, has decided to hold his keynote speech anyway, inside a nearby restaurant.

“Oracle just canceled my keynote tomorrow,” he said in a statement. “But the show must go on! Everyone is welcome to join me at Ame Restaurant tomorrow to hear about the social enterprise. Sorry Larry (Ellision, CEO of Oracle), the cloud can’t be stopped.”

Benioff used to work for Ellison at Oracle but he broke off to create Salesforce.com, the customer relationship management service provider that touts cloud computing, or services based on web-connected data centers rather than client-based software.

Benioff also tweeted his announcement this evening. AllThingsD reports that Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said the move was a change in schedule, due to the heavy attendance at the conference. The Salesforce.com “executive solution session” was moved to Thursday at 8 am in the Novellus Theater.

Benioff has been critical of Oracle in the past, saying that it advocates a “false cloud.”