SAN FRANCISCO — Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle Develop and JavaOne are consuming a huge chunk of the city by the bay this week, spilling out of the cavernous Moscone Convention Center, shutting down a key section of the heavily traveled Howard Street and gobbling up several nearby hotels.

The massive trade shows will feature more than 1,800 sessions, 400 partner exhibits, nearly 400 Oracle demos, keynotes, labs and networking events, and untold thousands of bleary eyed developers, customers, journalists and analysts.

On Sunday night, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison rolled out his firm’s ambitious entry into the private cloud computing battle, increasing the stakes between Oracle and rivals like HP and IBM.

Ellison detailed the Exalogic Elastic Cloud, which the company is calling the world’s first integrated middleware machine. It’s a system featuring 30 servers, each loaded with two six-core processors for a grand total of 360 processor cores. They are linked to each other, and to storage, through Infiniband connections. Ellison said the cloud systems support both Solaris and Linux OSes and include the middleware companies need to run apps.

Oracle said the software has been tuned to exploit the I/O fabric in the Exalogic Elastic Cloud machine to deliver performance results 10 times better than a standard application server configuration. 

Mark Hurd, the new Oracle co-president and famous (infamous?) former CEO of HP, introduced the keynotes Monday morning, amplifying what his new boss said the day before.
What’s the likelihood that Oracle will be the cloud leader, Hurd said, with a huge range of powerful hardware and software tools and features? “Very high,” he said.

Unfortunately, Hurd’s short opening remarks Monday morning were followed by one of the dullest keynotes on record, from Fujitsu exec Noriyuki Toyoki. Meanwhile, most of us in the increasingly restless press corps had to deal with a familiar trade-show problem while Toyoki  droned on:  Shoddy (or non-existent) Internet connection, due to system overload.
(Note to Larry: Intel had a separate press and analyst wireless network at the recent Intel Developer Forum.)

Ellison also detailed the first release of his company’s long-awaited, next-generation business applications, Fusion Applications, which will be available in Q1 of 2011.

Fusion Applications promises to be a serious player in the business application space, combining application architecture, design and deployment, through which customers will be able to extend the value of their apps environment by using Fusions Applications components side by side with their existing applications portfolio.

It will be a huge rollout, Ellison said, with 100 different products available simultaneously, in seven different product families.

“Oracle Fusion Applications bring a new era of application software and technology investments going forward,” said Steve Miranda, SVP of Oracle Application Development.  “To set a new standard, we listened and gathered the best practices from thousands of customers to deliver the first 100 percent open and standards-based business applications. Beginning today, Oracle Fusion Applications define how organizations innovate, work and adopt technology.”

John Fowler’s keynote emphasized Oracle’s key differentiator: its ability to support the largest of enterprise customers who have high performance needs within their mission critical deployments.

“We have $4 billion of R&D dedicated to enterprise application development,” said Fowler, executive vice president of Oracle’s Customer Services. He boasted that Oracle’s massive resources will help build his company’s underlying technology, including Java, legacy software/hardware products and microprocessors. “We’ll continually iterate under these technologies to build different properties in runtime environment around performance, availability, security and management.”

Check DevX.com and InternetNews.com for more show coverage.