This is a historic week. During the height of Oracle OpenWorld, it’s the social Web and the revolution of mobile that has become the focus of the conversation.

It’s not Larry Ellison. It’s not Exalytics or Exadata. It’s the social enterprise. That is the voice being heard more than ever before.

By canceling Marc Benioff’s keynote, Ellison has opened the ears of the most powerful CIOs in the world. I would bet that never before has a canned speech by Benioff garnered such attention.

The address did not come in a cavernous convention hall at Moscone. It happened in a restaurant at the St. Regis hotel. It’s not a mass audience. It’s a small, engaged address to a few people – plus over a thousand streaming online viewers.

These cascading series of events may lead to real adoption of social technologies inside the enterprise.

And it happened at Oracle OpenWorld.

When Ellison cancelled Benioff, Oracle lost control of the conversation. It lost control of the conference. And it lost control of the message.

The conversation now belongs to the community, which far more than ever before, is driving discussions on Twitter, Facebook and across the Web and through mobile apps.

In some ways, Oracle served as the perfect foil. Ellison’s attacks in the press reached a new level last week when the company released a press release that claimed Autonomy had shopped the company to Oracle at a far lower price before getting acquired by HP. It was a callous and cynical attack meant to destabilize HP and the board.

This lead in to Oracle OpenWorld and the infamous Larry Ellison keynote Sunday night. Ellison tripped on his words. He apologized that he had not slept since Friday. His son had gotten married. Larry was celebrating. Kudos to him. But it was a flop. And it set a climate for Benioff to publicly call out Ellison’s poor address.

By Tuesday afternoon, it became clear that Ellison had lost his cool. Benioff got the e-mail that his keynote had been canceled. That was the turning point.

Services Angle

I watched the Benioff address. Facebook’s CIO talked. Benioff asked about the data centers that Facebook uses. Proprietary mainframes? No. Facebook is built on a commodity infrastructure.

The future of services comes with a commodity infrastructure that can manage billions of transactions per day and do the analytics to bring true intelligence.

Kudos to Benioff. Ellison turned over the conversation to Marc. And Marc used it to help give it back to the community.

Next up: Larry Ellison keynote today at 3 p.m. We’ll cover it live on #theCube.