Oracle OpenWorld kicked off yesterday, with the company releasing a big batch of updates they’d saved up for the event. The big highlight was Larry Ellison’s hour-long keynote entitled “Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together: Why It’s A Different Approach.”

Ellison provided long-anticipated details on all the major products that Oracle has lined up for the coming months, dedicating a good bit of time to the latest release of his company’s database software.  12c is pegged as the ‘first multi-tenant database in the world’ –several years the making, this edition makes it possible to manage multiple DBs in a single logical container, significantly driving down hardware requirements.

Below is breaking analysis from SiliconAngle founder John Furrier, who discusses Ellison’s revamped vision of the cloud.

The CEO also unveiled the third generation Exadata machine, which runs databases in-memory and is 20 times faster than its predecessor, according to company data. It features 22TB of flash cache, built-in compression and a number of other things that Oracle hopes will help it compete with SAP’s HANA platform.

Lastly, Ellison also disclosed that his company is making a serious push into the as-a-service space. Oracle will offer remotely managed private clouds, alongside an infrastructure-as-a-service that will run on the same engineered systems used in client environments. This should make it easier to move Oracle support between on-premise and remote deployments, although it doesn’t seem to have much appeal beyond that.

There have been a number of other announcements come out of OracleWorld as well. Oracle debuted the release candidate for the upcoming 5.6 version of MySQL, as well as a preview version of MySQL Cluster 7.3. The latter will ship with support for Node.js a s well as  support for more changes on the fly.

As OracleWorld continues, expect more developments in the enterprise space, including a major team-up between Oracle and Nokia.  Customers of the database giant are getting access to Nokia’s location services, granting a wealth of data for Oracle clients and a broad opportunity for Nokia to penetrate the enterprise.

For more commentary on Oracle OpenWorld, we hear from Wikibon founder and principle analyst Dave Vellante, who will be broadcasting from Oracle’s annual event all week.  Tune in to SiliconAngle.TV or check out our YouTube channel for more.