During the entire Oracle-Salesforce duck and dive show with the cancelled keynote, it was obvious to me that this was not a spontaneous act.  It must have been orchestrated weeks before, because both parties would gain so much free marketing.

And they did.

For Salesforce, the Twittersphere and Facebook world were swarming with feeds and the live webcast presentation drew over 5000 views and 2000 concurrent viewers.

But you knew Larry Ellison would have the last word.  He’s the King and doesn’t like to be dethroned at his own game.

People like Larry Ellison do not like to lose, and he countered his punch with Oracle’s version of a public cloud.

Yes, you read that right, a public cloud. (not a private cloud)

Ellison is claiming Salesforce is the one with vendor lock-in and non functional inter-operability among other cloud vendors.

"Beware of false clouds," Ellison said, referring to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. "That is such good advice. I could not have said it better myself."

Ellison also lashes out against multi-tenant architecture, and that virtualization is the way to go.

He claims a separate virtualized database reduces the risk of your data contaminating with others.

With Fusion Applications, the infrastructure is built into the virtual machine along with the OS operating system and the database. And that is where your security is based from… bottom up from the infrastructure.

But what about Fusion Apps?

Fusion Applications are now in general release after six years of development.

"It took a little longer than we planned but it was a huge, huge engineering project to present a huge integrated suite … with all the different pieces rebuilt on top of modern technology. It’s complete, integrated and finally here," he said.

Ellison did not reveal when the service will be available

Hopefully it will not take another 6 years!

And finally, Ellison announced the Oracle Social Network, which adds social-networking functionality into Fusion Applications. 

Now, we are back to Round 1 of the heavyweight fight with Marc Benioff in one corner, and Larry Ellison in the other.

Let the Games Begin.