The focus of Larry's speech was both on the Oracle Cloud platform and the advances Oracle are making on engineered systems, through their line of processors.

Sunday night saw the official opening of Oracle OpenWorld 2014 in the shape of Larry Ellison's Keynote speech, setting the tone for the week-long conference that provides the latest product announcements and the latest developments at Oracle. We had great seats at the front as you can see from the image below!!

The keynote session this year opened with Oracle CMO Judith Sim, then Intel President Renée James took the stage before Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO (his brand new title!) Larry Ellison, closed things out.

Larry's speech cast the spotlight on both the Oracle Cloud platform (Complete Set of Cloud Services for building modern secure Cloud Applications) and the advances Oracle are making on their engineered systems. With Intel sharing the stage on Sunday evening, there was quite a lot of focus on Oracle's advances in their own line of processors - and particularly "Software in Silicon" which brings some of the functions previously performed by software directly into the processor and memory modules, speeding them up considerably, so that for example processor-intensive computations (such as encryption and (de)compression), can now be performed continuously without performance degradation.

The thread throughout was that these advances in engineered systems were going to be continuing to power Oracle's cloud platform. On the cloud platform side, the three key layers (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) were discussed:

Larry placed great emphasis on the fact that Oracle was the only provider of SaaS services where a standards-based extension platform was built in (via PaaS), providing the same platform to external developers to extend SaaS services as the internal Oracle developers used to build the SaaS service itself. No other vendor does this - and Larry was keen to point out the differentiation with the salesforce1 platform! Larry also emphasised that the database is the largest part of Oracle's cloud business and will continue to be in the future - 19 of the top 20 SaaS providers run on the Oracle database - and the developments in the Oracle 12c database have allowed Oracle to consolidate that position of immense strength.

It seems there will be a lot more Cloud platform announcements as the week progresses - this is the "big news" this week and will also be Larry's core focus in his new role as CTO.

Keep up to date with what we learn at OpenWorld 2014 via this blog, or follow us on twitter!