Oracle Openworld 2006 proved to be a gathering of industry leaders

San Francisco _ While Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was undoubtedly the star attraction of the show, Oracle Openworld 2006 proved to be a gathering of industry leaders who were united in their vision that the future of the computing was based around open standards rather than proprietary solutions, and that virtualisation would bring about a paradigm shift in the way business processes, and businesses themselves, operate.

Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, set the ball rolling with an overview of the event and explained how Oracle today was centred around three areas: its traditional database, Fusion middleware and enterprise applications.

Phillips said that Fusion was a proven set of middleware that offered things like security and identity management developed to a level that few, if any, smaller software companies could hope to develop themselves.

He also spoke of Oracle's recent buying spree and how they were able to add value. Most companies spend around one third of their time doing things that Oracle has already done in Fusion. By integrating them, their product development teams can now spend more time on innovation while any improvements they have are incorporated back into Fusion for the benefit of everyone building on this technology stack.

''The risk of getting everything from one vendor is offset by the fact that we are open and standards-based. You have to decide if the things we are creating add enough value to offset the need for multiple vendors. It's a good thing for us as it puts pressure on us to add value,'' he said.

Dr Hector Ruiz, CEO of AMD, noted how this year had signified the start of a new era in mainstream processor technology. What has happened is a phenomenon called choice, which has now been returned to the user.

The migration from 32 to 64 bit was a matter for the CIO to choose, not the chip vendor, and the migration should be a seamless one, as was the choice to focus on performance per watt rather than outright performance at any cost.

Ruiz said that he is fighting for a free and open market so that customers can choose on merit, rather than on style.

Ruiz showed a spoof video of him as the character Morpheus from The Matrix talking to a systems administrator. ''You've been forced to accept these things because you never thought you had a choice,'' he said.

AMD has a new plant in Austin, Texas, running on 100% renewable energy. It has reduced power in its own data centre and now gets 25% of power there from renewable energy sources. The company has also greatly increased its chip production capacity this year by contracting work to Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor.

He was joined by Michael Dell on stage in a sign of changing times. Dell, who had until recently been vehemently pro-Intel, spoke of the company's vision of virtualisation that would allow a data centre running Dell's management software to dynamically relocate processing and storage loads physically around the data centre in order to optimise power and cooling.

For instance, depending on the time of day, it would be possible to set policies to limit the data centre's power consumption in terms of kilowatts needed rather than in terms of computing power.

Dell and Ruiz spoke of AMD's new open architecture dubbed Torrenza which aims to harness the creative minds around the globe and get them to contribute to the ecosystem.

New sponsors Cisco predicted that more intelligence will be in the network. Soon, CIOs and system administrators would stop even wondering if the application they were using ran on the machine in front of them, down the hall or in a data centre on the other side of the planet.

Cisco CEO John Chambers said that back in 1997, Cisco had predicted convergence and how soon the Internet would be all about voice and video as well as data. Today, he predicts that we will soon see quad-play services everywhere, not just in the home, but in the mobile phone and even in the car as the industry faces what he called ''brutal consolidation.''

Chambers said that Moore's law is very much alive and the price/performance ratio of telecommunications is still doubling every 18 months. Soon the way enterprise applications are designed will change to take advantage of this.

Chambers said that each time there has been an architectural shift, from mainframe to mini, from mini to client sever, and today with virtualisation, there had always been a big change in the way applications are designed.