Oracle's Hurd Makes Surprise Appearance At NetSuite Conference

In a sign of the increasing ties between NetSuite and Oracle, Oracle president Mark Hurd made an appearance at NetSuite's SuiteWorld conference in San Francisco Tuesday, making a pitch for Oracle's Exadata database machine which NetSuite will use to run its large-scale cloud applications.

"When you're a customer of NetSuite, you're also a customer of Oracle," Hurd said in a brief appearance at the conference. "And that's very important to us."

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is the majority shareholder of NetSuite and NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson is a former Oracle marketing executive. But until now there have been no formal relationships between the two companies.

Tuesday NetSuite unveiled NetSuite Unlimited, a package of applications and services for large corporations, and announced plans to use Oracle Exadata Database Machines to power the new offering. Exadata is Oracle's high-end system for managing huge volumes of transactions and data.

Although Oracle and NetSuite seemingly compete in the ERP and CRM application markets, the two don't overlap as might appear at first glance given NetSuite's cloud-only application approach that has largely attracted SMB customers and Oracle's emphasis on selling on-premise applications for big companies. The two also list Microsoft, Salesforce.com and SAP as their chief software competitors.