Benioff Enjoys the Spotlight, Even When It Is Turned Off

11:57 p.m. | Updated Adding comment from Oracle and Mr. Benioff’s response.

Mark Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com, says he is very, very happy to be persona non grata at the Oracle OpenWorld trade show.

“This is the best possible outcome,” Mr. Benioff said in an interview. “It’s free publicity, and it is clear that Oracle is threatened by us.”

The Salesforce chief, a master a getting publicity, also lifted the curtain on a rarely-discussed part of tech industry trade shows – the C.E.O.’s who pay to talk at the shows. And apparently, if they get kicked off, they get their money back.

“Everybody pays,” Mr. Benioff said. “You pay about $1 million to be a speaker. That is true for our show, too.” The Salesforce show, called Dreamforce, rivals – Mr. Benioff says exceeds – Oracle’s 45,000-strong registration. The sponsoring company “pays for things, and they deliver people.”

Mr. Benioff, who earlier in the week publicized a series of blog posts panning Sunday’s opening talk by Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, said his company received an e-mail from Oracle about 3:15 p.m. Tuesday. He was scheduled to appear Wednesday morning. “They said we were canceled,” he said. “They are giving us our million dollars back.”

In an e-mail, Oracle said: “Due to the overwhelming attendance at Oracle OpenWorld we had to make several session changes. The Salesforce.com Executive Solution Session was moved to Thursday at 8:00am in the Novellus Theatre.”

Mr. Benioff said he would be unable to appear at that time, as he was previously scheduled to travel to Ohio, “and besides, the show is over then.” While that is not exactly true, Thursday consists of seven hours of seminars, without a show floor or keynote speeches. Oracle is also holding a free concert for show attendees late into Wednesday, making attendance at an early Thursday session a dubious prospect.

While at first saying he was mystified as to why Oracle would bump his million-dollar appearance, Mr. Benioff later said he got scrubbed “because Sunday night was such a disaster. Larry was not prepared. The keynote was panned in the blogs and in the on Twittersphere. There was concern that we would put on a better presentation. You don’t have somebody over to your house to tell better jokes than you.”

In addition, Mr. Benioff said, “We’re doing fantastic as a company, and it’s fundamentally viewed as a threat to an industry which Oracle leads, along with Microsoft.”

Maybe, or maybe Oracle just doesn’t like an upstart. Salesforce.com reported annual revenue of about $2 billion and has a market capitalization of $16 billion. Oracle, with $36 billion in revenue, has a market cap of $144 billion.

The Salesforce chief, a highly capable salesman, still intends to appear at a nearby hotel Wednesday. “This is the story everyone will be talking about,” he predicted. “We’re just talking about what we can do,” he said. “Maybe the first slide will be ‘The Top Ten Reasons Why I’m Not Onstage.’ ”