New launches lay down the gauntlet at Oracle Open World

The conference started with a number of product announcements and a bullish, even bullying, key note address from CEO Larry Ellison. He announced his firm's intentions to go after the cloud and revealed Oracle's standpoint on the topic, then proceeded to publicly challenge rivals Salesforce.com's interpretation and more or less issue a "we're coming to get you" warning. In a later speech, Ellison barracked Salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff after the latter had questioned the thinking behind Oracle's new cloud hardware.

The main point of contention between the two arose when Ellison unveiled the Exalogic Elastic Cloud Hardware, labelled the 'cloud in a box'. The machine, which holds 30 servers and is said to be 10 times the capacity of IBM's biggest machine, created controversy over the definition of the cloud. Benioff said in his own address at the conference: "Clouds are not in a box and they never will be in a box - that's the whole idea."

Ellison's retort was direct: "What does he think Salesforce runs on, if not a box? I'm sure Marc's people will tell him you do need boxes. You really do."

Oracle's latest technology launches

Ellison was also keen to point to the huge number of technology launches the company has made recently. "We've announced more new technology and more innovation this week than any time before in Oracle's history," he said.

The company's strategy seems to be leading heavily towards the cloud, and even more towards integrating software and hardware into one system. "Our annual investment in R&D is now going to exceed $4bn per annum and why stop there? Our strategy is quite simple. It is to take a lot of separate pieces that our customers used to buy as components and take those pieces and do pre integration. Let's get those pieces integrated together and deliver you complete working systems like Exadata and Exalogic, we think that will make our customers' lives simpler," Ellison explained.

The other major announcement from the company came in the shape of Oracle Fusion applications. The new enterprise applications have been a long time in development, and can be used side by side with an existing applications portfolio. The applications are available with a number of deployment options, including on-premise, private clouds, public clouds and business process outsourcing.

New Solaris, MySQL

Other products to be launched included the latest version of the company's operating system Solaris. The 11th version of this software is offered alongside the new version of the firm's Kernel, called the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

MySQL 5.5 was introduced at the show, with a number of improvements. "I know a bunch of people were concerned when we took over MySQL, if we were going to kill it, but no we want to make it better and make money," commented Ellison.

With the huge number of attendees, coming from 113 different countries, and more than 2,400 sessions for those people to attend, the Oracle Open World Conference was a perfect opportunity for the giant company to flex its muscles, and flex it did.

The event was rounded off with an appreciation event featuring the Black Eyed Peas, Don Henley and Steve Miller, but the week's most powerful performance came from Larry Ellison's uncompromising speeches and his company's unrelenting march to greater heights.