OOW highlights: The governator and Ellison’s $10M challenge

Larry Ellison’s milking his latest anti-IBM jihad for all it’s worth. Now he’s challenged anyone to make IBM hardware run Oracle database as fast as it runs on Oracle’s Exadata database machine. If they can do it, they can take $10 million of Larry’s (or Oracle’s) money. He welcomed IBM itself to participate.

Ellison also brought embattled California guv Arnold Scharzenegger on stage to talk up tech love. Ahnold  is a big fan of all techs–nano, clean, bio, high– and credits technology for fueling all of his careers. Specifically he named new-fangled excercize equipment and food supplements for his early body-building success. And Hollywood’s green screens for making him look manly in his colossal struggles with snakes (in Conan) and other cyborgs (Terminator movies.)

As for product updates, Ellison claims great take up for Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM–certainly claims that surprise many in the Oracle ecosystem who see little adoption in either case. Attendees hope he’ll do more than demo the always-on-the-horizon Fusion apps.  They want delivery dates.

Reuters reported today that Oracle will pledge Fusion apps,which were supposed to start rolling out in 2008, for 2010 release.