Oracle's Ellison: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

With each Oracle OpenWorld, CEO Larry Ellison's keynotes get more bizarre.

Last year, Ellison came across as on proving to the world that his new SPARC T4 servers were bigger, faster, and badder than any of IBM's offerings. Then there was that weird quip where he called Salesforce's cloud "a roach motel," and Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff's OpenWorld keynote moved to a time when most attendees were either gone or numbed from first-day convention information overload.

Ellison seemed more subdued during this year's keynote. But one moment that brought some of last year's strangeness to mind was when Ellison presented a projected slide of new up-and-coming products (although no release or ship dates were mentioned). The slide, depicting Oracle's new and enhanced SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offerings, had a bold line of text stating: "Primary competitor is Salesforce.com and not SAP."

That's weird; explicitly declaring who isn't your competitor—loosely translated as your enemy. It's understandable when someone says, "so-and-so is my enemy," but no one except the paranoid says, "so-and-so isn't my enemy."

The slide also informed us that as far as competitors go, when it comes to Oracle's PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) offerings, it's Amazon.com that's the competitor, not IBM— despite what anyone may think.

That message seems to conflict with IBM being Ellison's fixation last year. In short, it just seems as if Oracle is determined to challenge any other big tech for marketshare dominance, unless that big tech company is mostly making desktop software, SMB servers, gaming systems, or smartphones.

Here's a rundown of what Ellison announced at his keynote:

• Oracle 12c: The latest version of Oracle's database, and yes, "c" is for "cloud." Oracle 12c is touted as a multi-tenant, cloud database and is sure to compete with Salesforce.com's Database.com.
• Exadata X3: The "hardware foundation of the Oracle cloud." Ellison stated that if you thought last year's Oracle servers were fast, "you ain't seen nothing yet." X3 is a database in memory server. It has 26 terabytes of memory and stores multiple databases in flash memory. Ellison said these are the world's fastest computers for business. The entry level configuration is $200,000.
• Oracle will deliver three-tiers of service including: SaaS, with CRM Suite, HCM Suite, and ERP Suite; PaaS, with Oracle DBMS #1, Java #1, Fusion Middleware, Oracle Social Network; IaaS, with virtualization, Compute Service, Storage Service, Exadata, Exalogic, SuperCluster, and InfiniBrand.

Earlier today, Nokia and Oracle that will give Oracle customers access to the Finnish phone maker's location platform, the companies announced Monday.