Oracle's Tent City, San Francisco, U.S.A.

OOW + OD + J1 = Big. Wow. This week was the Oracle triple play – Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle Develop and JavaOne. This is the first year, of course, that Java is owned by Oracle, and therefore, it’s the first year that JavaOne is an Oracle production instead of an event thrown by Sun Microsystems.

How many people went to the combo event? By my rough estimate, 6.4 trillion. Yes, I know. I may be exaggerating. The official figure is 40,000 attendees, 1,800 classes and 450 exhibitors strewn across multiple convention centers and hotels encompassing both the South of Market and Union Square sections of San Francisco.

But frankly, the event blew out San Francisco – itself not a small town. This is the type of event that is normally found in Las Vegas, and in fact, seeing all the tents (filling up city streets, with traffic diverted), and seeing all the attendees with aching feet, I was reminded of COMDEX events back in the 1980s.

The big difference, of course, is that COMDEX heralded the growth of the personal computer industry. Before it got too big and imploded, attendees flocked to COMDEX to see new stuff, preferably from little tiny companies that might, just might, become big some day.

By contrast, the Oracle trifecta was all about celebrating the growth of the Oracle industry. Oracle products, Oracle partners, Oracle this, Oracle that, 11 out of the leading 11 companies use Oracle, blah blah blah. A prime example of the emphasis on the company itself was the Moscone North shrine to the 33rd America’s Cup yacht race, won earlier this year by the Oracle BMW Racing team.

The message: Oracle plays to win. Despite the crowds, craziness and confusion, OOW + OD + J1 demonstrated not only that Oracle is huge, but that it is advancing and dominating nearly every enterprise computing front.

Want proof? At the show there were lots of announcements around Oracle’s packaged applications, but that’s only the beginning. The hyperkinetic company also unveiled a Java roadmap, declared its commitment to open-source developer communities, upgraded its middleware, put a new kernel into its Linux distribution, launched a new generation of 16-core SPARC processors introduced a new set of massive database server hardware, revved the SunRay terminals, demoed a new MySQL release candidate, enhanced its storage products, hyped its plans for the cloud… the list goes on and on.

Oh, yes, Oracle also talked about its jaw-dropping financials. It announced quarterly revenue up 48% to US$7.5 billion, profit up 10% to $1.19 billion, and software license sales up 25%.

It was an impressive week – except, of course, for non-IT folks who live or work in San Francisco, who had to navigate around Oracle’s mega-conference. I’m sure that Oracle’s competitors weren’t too happy either. Larry Ellison’s ego might be huge, but then again, so is his company.