 Welcome to News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV for Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. It's day four of Oracle Open World, one of the world's largest tech conferences for business decision makers, IT management, and line of business end users, which will come to a close at the Moscone Center tomorrow. Joining us now from San Francisco to summarize some of the conference highlights is Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante. Welcome to the show Dave. Hi Kristen. So Dave, update us on yesterday's keynotes. We want to hear all about the morning keynotes especially. Well as we talked about yesterday in our morning call Kristen, Joe Tucci was up and as expected Joe Tucci was very respectful. He's presenting to an audience on Oracle's home court and basically he did exactly what we thought he would do. He gave the audience a heavy dose of cloud meets big data, talked about EMC and VMware's virtualization strategy, their cloud strategy. He also talked a lot about flash. He in a way kind of geeked out for a while with the audience, which was kind of fun to watch and was very avuncular and I've called Joe Tucci the godfather of the IT industry and he presented himself as a great ambassador. So that was very strong and then Jeremy Burton, EMC's CMO and now head of products came out and took a couple of jabs at Oracle, very tongue-in-cheek, lightweight. At one point he said choice and flexibility. We want to give you choice and flexibility, something that you haven't heard much about at Oracle Open World, which was kind of funny. We had Jeremy on the cube later on in the afternoon and asked him about that and kind of had fun with it. But in general I thought that what EMC did was they put forth their strategy and juxtaposed their approach relative to Oracle and really I think did a good job appealing to the Oracle crowd. I heard you mentioned flash. What were some of the other big show themes yesterday? Well you know Oracle first and foremost is a software company. The irony is that Sunday night in Larry Ellison's keynote he was talking about big iron and hardware and it was also interesting yesterday to note that EMC was up there largely talking about software, big data and automated tiering software and the like. So when you walk the show floor it's very much a software show. The big integrators there, the big partners of Oracle like Accenture and others are really pushing Fusion apps. It's a big business for them to integrate Fusion apps to get them up and running. That really is a major focus of what's going on at Oracle Open World. At the same time since Oracle's acquisition of Sun they have become this new type of player. So you do see and hear a lot about things like flash storage. Flash accelerates database performance. It's a crowd of database administrators largely and they want to see faster performance. So you heard a lot about flash in the sense of affecting the performance of the database. We also heard about kind of a boring topic we talked about on the cube which was protecting the data. Remember people running Oracle applications are running their most mission critical data in the Oracle database and so protecting that data and backing up in a proper way is critical. Oracle announced a new database 12C. You're hearing a lot about that. Oracle is pushing very hard. Of course the C stands for cloud and that's the other big theme that you heard. Of course we all remember a couple years ago Larry Ellison at the Churchill Club ranting about how cloud is water vapor and it's just a bunch of servers and storage and memories inside of a data center off and online. It's something that Oracle claims they've been doing for a long long time. So you're hearing a lot about cloud. It's interesting to know when you walk the show floor Amazon Web Services has a booth there. So they're clearly a competitor that wants to get a piece of that Oracle customer pie. Now Oracle founder Larry Ellison what did he have to say in his keynote what were some of the major topics. Well Larry was a classic Larry on point somewhat more measured than I think he's been in the past but did a very good job of laying out Oracle strategy and as I said Oracle is a software company first. He focused a lot on fusion apps. One of the things he talked about of course remember last year he told us that it took six years to develop that fusion portfolio the middleware and the fusion apps. So he spent a fair amount of time conveying to the audience the benefits of fusion apps. I thought the most interesting part of his keynote was again his cloud discussion. He talked about the consumption by their customers of fusion apps and he kept emphasizing in classic Larry way we have a lot of customers and so in a style that he's used before he went through and gave examples of companies like Overstock and Hitachi data systems and many many many many others pointing out that they have a lot of customers for their fusion apps but not only the fusion apps for the online version in the Oracle public cloud which Oracle announced last year and he made the he gave the audience some some data so that two-thirds of the sales of fusion apps are online in the Oracle public cloud. Now what many people might not know is he's probably talking a large part of that is Tulio and and right now two companies that Oracle acquired. Now as I said it took six years for Oracle to develop that whole fusion strategy. It's all written in Java and and those two companies write their software in Java and so I guess that's how Larry's including them in that whole mix and I think it's a legitimate thing to include them but the point is that he's trying to emphasize and demonstrate to the world that Oracle has a public cloud strategy that has a SaaS strategy to really try to combat salesforce.com. The other thing we talked about is that he said just because we're in the cloud doesn't mean we have to ignore industry standards so that we can go proprietary. So in classic Ellison fashion he took the biggest criticisms of Oracle i.e. that they're closed and that they're proprietary and he turned them into a benefit saying that all of our software is written in Java industry standard software that interconnects and can share data across applications. So in essence he was making the counterpoint that Jeremy Burton made. He actually used the word choice and so we give you the choice because we use open standards. So again very strong presentation by Ellison. The last thing I'll tell you is he gave a demo, a long long demo which was their attempt to show that they're in the big data space and the bottom line of the demo was big data needs big iron which is kind of ironic. I think a lot of people might disagree with that. I think in general big data and big iron don't necessarily go together but it's clear that Oracle's strategy is to bring big exadata and exolytics expensive iron to the big data space. Dave you've been there since the conference began on Sunday so I really want to hear your overall assessment of Oracle Open World. Well nothing joked that Oracle Open World is called Oracle Close World. Why do we do that? Well you're big tense and you feel like you're enclosed and you're really it's all about Oracle. Oracle lets its partners in and the partners give some keynotes but it's really always comes back to Oracle. It's very well orchestrated and I think the bottom line Kristen is that this is a big show and there's a lot of customers here and everybody has to appeal to those customers and so they've got to dance to that Oracle drumbeat and they do and so I think overall the show is not as exciting as some of the other shows. It's kind of constraining in a way but it's big business and there's a lot of business being done at this event. We've talked a lot about Oracle's new strategy. Do we believe that this is really game-changing or is it just sort of a marketing ploy? I think it is game-changing. I think Oracle's acquisition of Sun really changed the computer industry's landscape. As John Curry about many times, Larry Ellison wants to be the Steve Jobs of the enterprise bringing hardware and software together and that's what they've done. Their whole strategy is to engineer hardware and software together. When Oracle bought Sun most pundits predicted that Oracle would spin out the hardware business that it wouldn't want to be in the hardware business. Well in that sense Oracle did change the game with things like Exadata and that whole push toward bringing hardware and software together. It changed the dynamics of the industry. It changed their partnership relationships and it really changed in many cases the value proposition that companies are putting forward to their customers so I do think it's game-changing. Who do we see as Oracle's biggest competitors now? Well the IT industry, Kristen, has become an oligopoly where you have five or six of the largest companies that kind of control the chess board and of course those companies including Oracle are companies like IBM, certainly Microsoft, Cisco, Intel. I would put VMware and EMC in there as well because they've got so much momentum. So I think in terms of Oracle's biggest competitors you still have to put IBM up there and the reason I do that is because IBM and Oracle uniquely sell to the Fortune 1000 more effectively than any other corporations. That's where they make a lot of their money and a lot of their margins. At the same time I would put VMware and EMC in there because they have such industry momentum. VMware is trying to become the cloud platform of the enterprise and Oracle is using its database to try to be the platform of the enterprise and now with its new cloud strategy the cloud platform of the enterprise. And of course Microsoft while still relevant I think is the competitor that Oracle knows well. I do think there is an emerging set of competitors particularly in the big data space that approach the world very differently than Oracle. So collectively I think the open-source movement is also a big competitor and I think Oracle can do again what we've talked about on theCUBE a lot is they will wait until the industry trend crosses the chasm and then they'll jump in and grab that company and acquire that company. So really I think it's IBM, I think it's VMware and I think it's the open-source movement and the big data movement that are the big three competitors and then of course there are you know many many others around the periphery. Well Dave thanks so much for your input and we'll be talking with you again soon. All right thanks for having me on Kristen. For more breaking analysis and the latest in tech innovation keep up to date with news desk on SiliconANGLE TV number one in tech event coverage.