EMC Greenplum has pulled a YouTube video it produced that depicted Larry Ellison with a gift box tied to the fly of his pants.
It was supposed to be a joke about Oracle’s “cloud in a box,” strategy. Now it has turned out to be an embarrassment and EMC has removed it.
David Linthicum posted the video late last week. At the time, the video was making the rounds on various video communities. Now we can’t find a copy of of the video on any site, anywhere.
The video is part of a series EMC is doing that features a Larry Ellison impersonator as the Exalogic machine and the supposedly cool guy from EMC as EMC Greenplum. The spots are obvious copies of Apple’s “I’m a Mac,” ad campaign. The only problem? These videos are hokey.
In this video, EMC makes a joke of Oracle’s pipeline and how big it is. Yes, they also make a joke about artificial enhancement.
Classy, huh?
When he posted the article on InfoWorld, Linthicum had this to say about the video:
Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for having technology company take innovative approaches to marketing, such as stealing premises from Apple and hiring actors that look like billionaire software executives and attaching props to their crotch. However, EMC cloud is missing the core message and, thus, any potential customers it is trying to reach.
Linthicum states it best when he says both Oracle and EMC really want you to buy more software and hardware. That really is about the extent of it.
He’s right. Both Oracle and EMC are trying to sell customers on the need to buy millions of dollars in new data center equipment. Is that cloud computing? We hardy think so.
But they are not alone. It’s a trend we see emerging from Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, too. The companies recently announced a new line of data warehouse appliances, designed for companies building private clouds. The $2 million appliances are intended to counter recent offerings from Oracle and IBM.
