Yachts, Motorcades, Coopetition Key Oracle OpenWorld

The first thought striking many of the 35,000 (that's 35 THOUSAND!) attendees of this years show must have been: "Nice boat."

Descending the escalators and stairways to Charles Phillips' kick-off keynote, there it was: Larry Ellison's sleek BMW Team Oracle Yacht.

Turnout was huge. But that's what you get when you keep buying companies and their customers.

As expected, Oracle continued to make nice with IBM, now an even bigger partner in a coopetitive kinda way. After all, many PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and now Siebel customers are also IBM customers. So can the talk of IBM's evil ways. At least for now.

Phillips said Oracle is working with Big Blue to certify that its next-gen applications will work well with IBM's WebSphere. Hmm. As well as they do on Oracle's own app server??? Time will tell.

"We've announced middleware support for WebSphere on the database side and are forming a Fusion Strategy to sort these issues out," Phillips told reporters.

But Oracle apparently won't be showing similar love to BEA Systems, another app server power. "We've nothing announced with BEA," Phillips said. "There's not a lot of customer demand for that. IBM is an important relationship for us and that was the more immediate issue. The idea is to make our software as hot-pluggable as possible," Phillips said, adding that Oracle doesn't see "BEA as being a factor out there."

Could Oracle be trying to depress BEA's value to make it more of a bargain? Skeptics wanna know. But another Oracle exec, asked point blank if Oracle would buy the app server player, scoffed: "There's nothing left. There's no IP."

As for the traffic-clogging motorcade, it caused quite a stir on Market and Fourth Street among the Moscone-bound crowd. Everyone wanted to know who was in those dark SUVs…Condi? Putin? W? Larry?

"Larry's not that important," said one passerby.

"Yeah, but he thinks he is," said another.