Oracle: OpenWorld Kicks Off, Autonomy Hubbub

Oracle kicked off its OpenWorld 2011 conference Sunday with a keynote from CEO Larry Ellison, who announced the Exalytics appliance. Additional keynotes during the five day conference include EMC's Joe Tucci, Michael Dell, Cisco's John Chambers, and Infosys CEO S. D. Shibulal. The Wednesday session should be interesting, as Ellison is expected to share his views on Oracle's cloud computing strategy spanning both private and public clouds. Two years ago at a Churchill Club appearance Ellison let loose with an epic rant about the cloud computing hype. Oracle OpenWorld is being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Keynotes, sessions and more will be streamed live on the Oracle OpenWorld YouTube channel.

The run-up to OpenWorld featured a bevy of Oracle news. Here's a roundup:

Oracle, Autonomy and Shopping

In a series of statements ,Oracle said that Autonomy had been 'shopped' to Oracle as well as HP (which bought the company for $11 billion), and it had power point slides from the meeting between Mark Hurd,  Oracle M&A chief Douglas Kehring and Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch.  Oracle said it wasn't interested because it felt the price was too high.  HP agreed to acquire Autonomy for over $11.7 billion. In a second press release Oracle updates the saga by saying that Mike Lynch remembers and admits to meeting with Oracle President Mark Hurd, but only for technical topics. Oracle placed the Autonomy PowerPoint slides on their website. Autonomy said the slides were not shared by Autonomy, but by investment banker Frank Quattrone - who later confirmed that he had "shopped" Autonomy without Lynch's knowledge. Is this all a play to soften up HP for a takeover from Oracle? Apparently not.

Exalogic Elastic Cloud Extreme Performance

Oracle (ORCL) announced that Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management 2.0.1, running with Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2, processed 1 billion meter reads per hour. The system also responded to 19.3 million requests for bill determinants per hour, equating to 77.2 million bill calculations per hour.

"This test assures utilities that Oracle hardware and software – engineered to work together, and available today – can process the huge volumes of data arriving from interval reads and ensure the usability of the data to produce the accurate, timely bills customers expect. In combination with other tests we are running in this series, this illustrates Oracle’s outstanding ability to help utilities conquer the smart metering ‘data deluge,’” said Linda Jackman, group vice president of Industry Strategy, Oracle Utilities.

 Plans for Hadoop, NoSQL

GigaOm reports that Oracle is working on a connector to let customers load unstructured data from Hadoop into their Oracle Exadata appliances. Speculation is that at Oracle OpenWorld they will unveil plans for a big data platform that features the Hadoop connector, called Oracle Loader for Hadoop, and a NoSQL database.