Oracle cancels Benioff keynote at OpenWorld

Update: Oracle has told The New York Times that Marc Benioff's keynote was rescheduled to Thursday morning, rather than cancelled. Benioff reportedly declined the new time slot.

Linked gallery: Photos: Oracle OpenWorld 2011

Oracle has rescheduled a keynote presentation by former executive and Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff scheduled for the fourth day of its OpenWorld conference this week, leading to its cancellation.

Benioff tweeted on Tuesday afternoon that his keynote had been cancelled by Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison.

He later tweeted that he did not know why his keynote had been cancelled.

Spokespeople for both Salesforce.com and Oracle decline to comment on the matter.

Benioff arranged to carry on with the keynote at a venue close to the Moscone Centre in San Francisco, where Oracle is hosting its 45,000-strong conference.

Oracle had planned for Benioff to speak on the "rise of the social enterprise", echoing his keynote presentation at Salesforce.com's annual conference Dreamforce earlier last month.

Benioff had warned that corporate executives could share the fate of overthrown Tunisian and Egyptian presidents as the ‘social revolution’ reached consumers and staff.

However, Benioff had come out hard against the keynote delivered on Sunday night by his former employer, Ellison, labelling the speech a "low bar" and retweeting a 60-second video cobbled together from Ellison's catch cries on the night.

The two had also sparred at last year's OpenWorld, after Benioff warned Twitter followers to "beware of the false cloud", based on the definition offered by Ellison.

Benioff tweeted in a similar vein about OpenWorld this year, although Oracle did not focus on cloud computing to the same extent at last year's conference.