Amidst the brouhaha surrounding the spat between Oracle and Salesforce at Oracle Openworld this year, Oracle unveiled a public cloud service to strengthen its position in the SaaS market. The world’s second largest software maker also announced significant products that would help companies make better business decisions by making sense of the growing avalanche of corporate data. Here’s a rundown of the key announcements and what they mean for enterprises: …

The growing rivalry between Salesforce.com and Oracle reached a pinnacle this week when Oracle reportedly canned a Salesforce.com keynote at its annual confab.

In a statement today, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Oracle cancelled his Wednesday morning address (U.S. time) at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 held in San Franciso’s Moscone Center. Instead, Benioff will organize a separate session at a nearby restaurant. …

Five years in the making, Oracle’s line of next generation business applications is finally out of the box.

The subject of almost every Oracle Openworld event for the last few years, Fusion Applications is built from the ground-up and represents a major engineering feat for the enterprise software giant.

According to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the company spent “a lot of time” rewriting applications with features taken from its own Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel.

Built with a service-oriented architecture in mind, Fusion Applications and its underlying Web services components can connect with other applications to pass on data that traverse a gamut of business processes. The software components are all built with Java and can run on industry standard Java middleware.

According to Oracle, Fusion Applications spans several product categories including Customer Relationship Management, Human Capital Management, Financials, Governance, Risk & Compliance, Supply Chain Management, Procurement and Project Portfolio Management.

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The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle had left developers on tenterhooks over the future of the Java programming language.

Those concerns were laid to rest on Monday by a top Oracle executive who shared the Java roadmap with JavaOne attendees on the sidelines of Oracle Openworld.

Thomas Kurian, Oracle executive vice-president for product development, said: “I’ve been at JavaOne since 1997, but this year is very special for us because it is the first year that Oracle is the steward and responsible for Java. What we want to do today is to make sure every developer is crystal clear on where we see the Java platform evolving.”

Oracle will unveil JDK 7 in 2011, with JDK 8 coming a year later, Kurian revealed. He also assured developers that Oracle is committed to delivering the best Java Virtual Machine as well as OpenJDK, the open source implementation of the Java programming language.

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Constrained by Red Hat’s tardiness in keeping Red Hat Enterprise Linux up to speed, Oracle has decided to spin off a new version of the Linux kernel dubbed the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

To date, Oracle Linux, which has claimed 5,000 customers, is built on the Red Hat Compatible Kernel that allows customers to continue running Red Hat applications.

In his keynote address Sunday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison highlighted key issues the company faced with retaining full compatibility with Red Hat.

“Oracle spends a lot of time finding bugs in Red Hat Linux and fixing them. However, when we find the bugs, Red Hat has been very slow in incorporating those bugs into their software,” he said.

Ellison also noted that Red Hat has also been slow to take up enhancements contributed by the community.

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Oracle became the latest major IT vendor to tap into the red-hot enterprise cloud computing market today when it unveiled its Exalogic Elastic Cloud today at its annual Oracle Openworld technology confab.

Targeted at large companies who wish to build their own “private clouds“, Exalogic is touted as a “compute cloud-in-a-box” product that includes a combination of servers, storage and networking components melded into a single machine.

“It includes all the hardware you need to run your applications, including 30 servers, infiniband networking that lets servers talk to one another and a high availability storage device,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said at the show’s opening keynote today. “It also has all the middleware you need to develop and run all your applications.”

Essentially, what Oracle has done is to make it easier for enterprises to set up virtualised data centres where IT resources can be dynamically deployed based on business needs with the help of virtualization technology. Oracle is employing Java VM in Exalogic, where applications can run on Linux or Solaris virtual machines.

The usual cloud computing characteristics apply to Exalogic: dynamic load balancing, failover using Oracle Coherence and the ability to add, remove or migrate virtual machines on the fly.

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In a turn of affairs, SAP announced this week that it would not contest the liability of TomorrowNow for downloading proprietary, copyrighted software products and other confidential materials used by Oracle’s support organization.

In 2007, Oracle filed a lawsuit against TomorrowNow, a now defunct SAP subsidiary that offered maintenance and support services for Oracle software at a much lower cost than that provided by Oracle. SAP had said then that it will aggressively defend the claims made in the lawsuit.

On Thursday, SAP said that it will accept financial responsibility for any judgment awarded against TomorrowNow, despite the fact that SAP was not involved in TomorrowNow’s service operations and did not engage in any of the copying or downloading alleged in Oracle’s complaint. …

After four years since its inception, Project Fusion, Oracle’s next generation suite of enterprise applications will finally be ready to enterprises in 2010.

At the closing keynote of this year’s Openworld conference which saw about 50,000 attendees throng the city of San Francisco, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the code base for the Fusion applications is ready, and customers have begun testing the products.

According to Ellison, Oracle will continue to support J.D Edwards and PeopleSoft applications under its Applications Unlimited program, along with its lifetime support policy.

The first version of the brand new Fusion Applications, built from the ground-up with its own technologies and those acquired from other companies, will include Financial Management, Human Capital Management, Sales and Marketing, Supply Chain Management, Project Portfolio Management, Procurement Management as well as Governance, Risk and Compliance. …

With more workers Twittering and connecting with one another through Facebook and other social networking sites, it is hardly surprising that enterprise technology vendors are starting to notice the potential of social media in business applications.

I caught up with Anthony Lye, Oracle’s senior vice president for CRM products who shared about the company’s Social CRM products that integrates the social networks of sales reps into existing CRM systems. The portfolio comprises the Oracle Sales Prospector, Sales Campaign and Sales Library, which allows sales reps to share information with one another, seek out sales leads by combining external information sources with internal customer data, as well as manage sales campaigns.

“Customers want to talk to other customers and these conversations are happening in Facebook and other social media,” Lye said during a media briefing at Oracle Openworld 2009. “It’s important for enterprises to listen to these conversations and take action.”

What social CRM does is to expose the structure of customer relationships within the CRM system through conversations. “For example, if I sell to telco A, can I see what telco B, C and D are buying, because people usually buy what others are buying.” …

Techgoondu caught up with Ron Weiss, Oracle’s director of product management, on the business value of Exadata, which combines storage, Oracle database and servers in a single hardware appliance. Oracle claims that this set-up improves database performance, particularly in datawarehousing and online transaction processing where on-the-fly responses to database queries are paramount.

In this video, Weiss also shared his views on the upcoming “Exadata killer”, dubbed the DB2 Pure Scale by IBM, which also happens to be a Gold sponsor of this year’s Openworld confab.