Oracle OpenWorld ended last Thursday.  The week included several major announcements from Oracle.  Here is my take on the biggest of those:

• Fusion Applications are now Generally Available
  • This marks the culmination of six years of effort and is a major accomplishment for Oracle.  They presented a list of more than 100 functional areas that are currently available, along with more than 200 early adopter customers.
  • The integration of business intelligence (BI) directly into the applications is touted as a major innovation.  It seems to be thorough and well thought out.  I’ll definitely be digging into this more in the coming months.

• New Exalytics BI Appliance
  • Exalytics is especially interesting to those of us in the BI space.
  • Early reactions from SAP:
    • Why SAP Hana is better (written by SAP)
    • Old Wine in New Wineskins

• Oracle Public Cloud and Oracle Social Network
  • Oracle Public Cloud is a hosted offering of Fusion Applications (with Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database as the foundation).
  • Early analyst reactions match mine – this is yet another hastily assembled incomplete offering.
    • Oracle Social Network baffles
  • This is Oracle’s PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering and, as such, it takes direct aim at Microsoft Azure (and the recently announced not-yet-available Google Cloud SQL).  It will be interesting to watch the battles that unfold in that space.

The week featured a lot of distraction from the ongoing war of words (most of it childish) between Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff.  I won’t elaborate on that here – I spoke enough about it last week.

One final comment: the concerts at the Appreciation Event on Wednesday night were a great success.  Sting was incredible.  Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers also delivered an outstanding performance.  Those who stayed until the very end (which I did) saw a short but inspired performance by The English Beat.  The evening was rain-free (confounding all the weather forecasts).  Nothing hampered our enjoyment – not even the drunken idiot who (literally) collapsed and crashed into my wife and me.  Congratulations to Oracle for a spectacular event.

For now… I’ll leave you with this thought:
 
It will be interesting if Oracle can deliver on its product promises, especially the new cloud offerings.  We’ll be watching (along with lots of others).