Oracle kicks off Openworld with cloud, Linux and Fusion

AT ITS ANNUAL user event in San Francisco, Oracle began proceedings with a release date for Fusion Applications, a new version of enterprise Linux, and the news that Salesforce.com isn't very good at cloud computing.

The long-awaited Fusion Applications, which Oracle said combine the best of its individual apps such as CRM and financials into one suite, will be available from the first quarter of 2011.

The suite has been five years in the making, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he expected it to take another five years for the majority of customers to have moved off the standalone products onto the integrated product set.

Oracle also announced the Exalogic Elastic Cloud, a private cloud system comprising hardware and software components to let firms run their own applications.

During his keynote at Openworld 2010, Ellison used the opportunity to have a dig at Salesforce.com about offering the wrong type of cloud.

Salesforce is purely an application that runs on the Internet, Ellison said. It is not virtualised, fault tolerant, secure or elastic, and features hundreds of customers' data co-mingled in the same database, he added.

Amazon on the other hand was commended for its approach, as a platform on which firms build applications and for its elastic model allowing customers to add more servers as needed so they only pay for what they use.

"Needless to say, Oracle agrees with Amazon.com on the definition of cloud," Ellison said, adding the cloud must be virtualised, elastic, and include hardware and software.

Salesforce is due to be presenting in San Francisco this week, so it will be interesting to see how outspoken chief executive Marc Benioff responds to Ellison's charges.

Red Hat also came in for a pasting from Ellison as he unveiled Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, aimed at offering firms a reliable and modern version of enterprise Linux.

"We spend a lot of time fixing bugs in [Red Hat Linux]," Ellison said, adding that even once Oracle has done all this work, Red Hat is still very slow to apply the fixes to its own version and is four years behind the current Linux version.

Although Oracle will maintain Red Hat compatibility for the long term, Ellison urged customers to go with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

One of the most hotly anticipated events at Openworld 2010 - after big hair-sporting, Top Gun-loving Berlin singing Take My Breath Away at the appreciation event of course - has been and gone in a flash.

Ex-HP chief executive Mark Hurd took to the Moscone stage twice on Monday morning, for only a few minutes each time.

He used his first appearance to gush about his new employer: "I'm thrilled to be here," he told the keynote crowd of thousands. "I'm really excited to be part of this."

He popped back up later in the morning, receiving a hearty round of applause, to give a few brief details on the new Exadata X2-8 release.

Wonder if he's been given a company credit card yet? µ