Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is kicking off on the 30^th and will be held through October 4, 2012 in San Francisco. The conference will attract tens of thousands of IT pros as well as hundreds of partners, and will provide a very good perspective on where Oracle now stands in the market.

For starters, Oracle’s set the goal of making OpenWorld more open – the contrast between the name of the gathering and the direction of event was criticized by  EMC’s David Nicholson at last year’s conference. In a press release Oracle said that it’s bringing back the Linux pavilion by popular demand. A number of unnamed vendors will be exhibiting their offerings for the company’s Linux distro and Oracle VM, its hypervisor.

Another highlight of the upcoming event will be Larry Ellison’s keynote. The CEO will talk about the premise of his company’s engineered systems in a token effort to boost weakening hardware sales. Oracle recently held its earnings call and made it clear that it expects revenue from data center equipment to decline over the next few quarters, but there’s still a lot of faith in the Exa line-up of preconfigured appliances.

While this is all going on, the list of exhibitors at the upcoming OpenWorld is starting to include a number of noticeable firms. A company called Brainware is among those that reserved a booth: it sells enterprise search software that integrates with Oracle’s ERP systems. The latter firm has been attempting to gain a foothold in the big data space to little avail, and a push from the ecosystem could prove very advantageous.

In addition to Brainware a couple of flash startups are also attending the event. SSD-based SAN provider Kaminario will be exhibiting along with STEC.

You can hear more analysis on the “openness” of Oracle from SiliconAngle Founding Editor John Furrier, who speaks candidly on the topic with SiliconAngle.TV host Kristin Feledy.  See the full video below: