Openworld in full swing…

Monday morning (PST) Oracle Openworld got underway for real with an opening Keynote from Charles Phillips that saw a swathe of news announcements that included:

* A demonstration of Oracle Beehive – the Only Complete and Open Platform for Integrated and Secure Collaboration

* Middleware, Database and Enterprise Manager capabilities to help customers take advantage of the benefits of Cloud Computing, starting with support for the Amazon Cloud

* The launch of My Oracle Support – a personalised and proactive platform for customer support

Following Charles Phillips and a surprise appearance from Olympic Swimming legend Michael Phelps; Senior Vice President for Application Development, Ed Abbo, announced an extension to Oracle’s portfolio of solutions for the Apple iPhone – Business Approvals on the move; as well as an extension of Oracle's Web 2.0-friendly Social CRM Applications with Sales Campaign and Sales Library.

Senior Vice President for Oracle Fusion Middleware, Thomas Kurian, opened his Keynote in the afternoon by formally welcoming BEA customers to their first Openworld as Oracle customers and then announced the launch of the Oracle Weblogic Application Grid , an architecture for application infrastructure that enables greater resource efficiency, dynamic scale-out, and predictable quality of service for enterprise applications.

For more insight on the announcements of the day, New Zealand Oracle Blogger Gareth Roberts provides a great summary on his blog.

Oracle Openworld sees a much larger Unconference session than last year. Watch this short video vignette from Australian Oracle Ace and "One-size-doesn't-fit-all" blogger - Chris Muir - talking about the Oracle Openworld "Unconference" and his presentation which he got elected for inclusion via the Oracle Mix community.

Finally, CBA’s Jon Waldron spoke in a panel session on Clusterware about how he was able to consoilidate an 8 node Grid at the bank on Oracle-only software including Oracle RAC High A availability clustering technology to create a multi site failover with Data Guard.