Oracle's mercurial chairman Larry Ellison does his sparring only at the highest level. The people he takes on are no less than Microsoft's Bill Gates and SAP's Henning Kagermann.
There is no recorded evidence of Ellison being put in a spot by lesser mortals, especially during a public address.
Till this morning, when a bureaucrat from Indore stole the limelight from him.
"Sorry to be spoiling the party today," Vishwapati Trivedi, commissioner, commercial tax, Madhya Pradesh, started his question after Ellison had finished his maiden address via satellite to an all-Indian audience: "Our department had installed an Oracle database for Rs 13 crore (Rs 130 million) on May 2. But the system just collapsed after two days."
While Ellison craned his neck to hear more, Trivedi delivered the knock-out punch: "I have been trying to get in touch with the senior executives of Oracle on e-mail. I also reached your service centre but no one responded."
A round of applause followed from the 800-plus people present immediately after Trivedi had finished.
Dressed in his customary grey jacket and a black T-shirt and sporting a suntan, Ellison immediately went on the backfoot.
"You are the first person who has told me that our database just does not work. I do not accept the charge. The Oracle database does work. Our database has been installed at over 200,000 locations. Large corporations like GE run on Oracle."
Having defended Oracle, it was time for him to do the damage control. "The problem could be with the application that has been written over the database and not with the database. I will ensure that Oracle India will do the best it can to solve the problem. Let's not worry about who caused the problem, but what is the problem."
Next came a little ego massage: "I cannot believe that a minister (the usually composed Ellison mistook Trivedi for one) called up the service centre and it did not respond. My e-mail is larry.ellison@oracle.com. Please write to me detailing the problem."
Immediately after this, a Tata Finance representative got up and said he has had a wonderful experience working with Oracle.
"Oracle is miracle," he told Ellison. It would have been music for his ears, except the public address system developed a snag when this was said.
No sooner was the session over, Trivedi was mobbed by newshounds, much to the chagrin of the Oracle Asia-Pacific brass present there.
Also fielding uncomfortable queries was S S Ghosh, the chief executive of CMC Ltd, which developed the application for Trivedi's office.
"We are looking into the issue and are trying to find the problem. CMC as well as Oracle engineers are working on it," Ghosh said before he was escorted away by Oracle executives.