Goliath takes aim at David

Larry Ellison used his closing keynote address to delegates at Oracle Open World to make it clear that his company is gunning for Red Hat.

He said that the company was growing its Linux business quickly and winning over customers daily without dedicating a salesforce to the project. He also accused Red hat of having buggy code.

"At Oracle we've been in the Linux business for a year now," he said.

"With the Red Hat code all we did for the first year was fix bugs. Now Oracle growing a lot faster than Red Hat. Red Hat's been growing too because it’s a growing market."

He continued that with the launch of Oracle VM his company would have something that Red Hat couldn't match.

Oracle on Monday unveiled the Oracle VM virtualization server that is based on the Xen open source technology. Red Hat has incorporated Xen into its Linux distribution.

Ellison also pointed out that Oracle had set up systems that would let Red Hat users switch to Oracle in a matter of minutes.

Ellison furthermore announced that the first Fusion applications would be released next year, although he refused to be drawn on when. The first modules would be for salesforce automation and the software would integrate totally with Oracle's ERP software.

In the much longer term he said all Oracle would rewrite all its applications to include a Fusion version. But this could take 10-15 years he warned.

Ellison was introduced for his keynote by singer Billy Joel, who is playing at tonight's 30th birthday party for the company.

"I'm excited to be here," he said.

"But considering how many car accidents I've had over the last few years I'm just excited to be anywhere."