Oracle OpenWorld

Oracle OpenWorld is an annual event showcasing product features and other news from Oracle Corporation. It is a multi-venue gathering held in San Francisco (USA), Sao Paulo (Brazil) and Shanghai (China). Each venue event is in turn a multi-day affair, usually beginning on a Sunday and running to Thursday.

OpenWorld is targeted at a range of Oracle current and potential customers such as IT management and decision-makers as well as line users of Oracle software. OpenWorld 2011 drew about 45,000 people at the San Francisco venue.

There is usually a significant focus on newly-developed technologies or acquisitions by Oracle, and how these can be integrated into the rest of the IT workspace. An example was Oracle's acquisition of Sun MicroSystems in 2010, which featured strongly in that year's OpenWorld event. Oracle representatives focused on how Sun's various products such as the Solaris operating system and Java application programming interface would be better integrated into Oracle's own offerings, such as the Oracle DB and the Oracle Fusion middleware suite.

At OpenWorld events, senior Oracle managers and product specialists hold various talks or seminars to explain various features and functionality of Oracle products. The product briefings typically consist of Oracle subject matter experts giving talks, hands-on lab sessions, product demos and exhibitions. The event is important in Oracle's annual calendar, so senior-level managers like CEO Larry Ellison and president Mark Hurd also usually give keynote speeches.

Oracle produces applications almost exclusively for use in business environments, unlike that other software behemoth Microsoft, which sells software products for both individual/ home users as well as organizations. So OpenWorld attendees are mostly corporate IT decision-makers.