Oracle CEO Safra Catz advises 'don’t eat dog food' (ORCL)

Flickr/Shawn Allen

There's a term in the tech industry called "dogfooding," and it comes from the phrase "eat your own dogfood." In the tech world, that means using your own products when running your company.

Apparently, Oracle's founder, CTO and executive chairman Larry Ellison loves both the idea and the phrase.

Oracle runs its own company on its own software products like its database and "dogfooding" was one of the reasons why Ellison bought Sun Microsystems back in 2010.

He wanted to own the hardware that will make Oracle's software run faster. And that same hardware is what Oracle is using to build its cloud.

Ellison says that by owning all of the tech that makes up its cloud, Oracle can offer cheaper prices to customers while dropping more profit to the bottom line. And it also pushes the company to constantly revamp its own products to serve their customers, as well as themselves.

Flickr/Shawn AllenThe only problem? Oracle CEO Safra Catz hates the idea of eating dog food, reports Den Howlett from Diginomica.

Speaking to cloud market research analysts during an event earlier this month at Oracle's headquarters, the graceful-but-sassy Catz made her case for why Ellison – and everyone else – should knock it off already:

Larry is fond of saying we should eat our own dog food. First of all, don’t eat dog food. It’s bad for you. It’s dangerous. We eat our own cooking. That’s correct. We have to eat our own cooking. You know why? Because the entire scale of our business is to the point where I cannot meet the demands of all our customers unless I transform myself, meaning Oracle.

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