OracleWorld: Dell and AMD getting cozy

AMD CEO Hector Ruiz kicked of the morning OracleWorld keynotes, telling the crowd of over 40,000 that power is being transferred from the vendor to the customer. It was a coded message. His more direct message is that users have choice: AMD or Intel. "Real choice should empower you," Ruiz said. "As CEO of company that wants your business, I bear the responsibility to ensure that you are offered real choice, have honest information and a free and open marketplace in which we can complete for business based on price and merit, based on substance not on style." Take that Intel. It was fundamentally a paid commercial for AMD over Intel without a single mention of the name "Intel."

Then, Michael Dell joined Ruiz on the stage [video here]. After many years of resistance, Dell will start shipping AMD-based systems in volume. Dell teased an announcement that he would be making this afternoon related to an AMD relationship, which is not going to make Intel happy. Dell's keynote is at 2:00 PM PST.

Last night Oracle President Charles Phillips kicked off the Oracle OpenWorld conference with the some highlight on the road to Fusion. During this week, Oracle will be talking up its Fusion architecture, a next-generation applications and middleware platform that will utilize components from its various acquisitions (PeopleSoft, Seibel, J.D. Edwards, etc.) and lay them into a unified SOA framework. Phillips described a Fusion stack--Oracle’s database, middleware and applications baked in at the factory as a way to simplify installation and management.