Oracle’s reasons for buying various cloud and social media companies seem to be coming into focus. I’ve learned over the last few days that there’s more to social media than cruising Facebook to see which of your high school friends is aging badly. Social media can mean helping an HR department figure out which of their employees have certain talents outside of the job they currently hold so they can simply promote someone internally rather than conduct an external candidate search. Social media can be a new way for dissatisfied customers to bring their grievances to light, perhaps via a rant on Facebook or Twitter (which, if your company is effectively monitoring, you can see and address), by posting on a reviews board or sometimes even more creative means (and, in some cases, hilarity ensues). Social media can mean crowdsourcing a question you have about a legal matter rather than calling your lawyer (and getting a steep bill in the mail a few days later) or spending hours poring over books in the library to try to figure the matter out for yourself.

Many older organizations have been less than enthusiastic to adopt social media, sometimes due to an older workforce that’s less comfortable with unfamiliar technologies, due to it not seeming to fit in to their workflows or processes, or sometimes due to regulations. To Oracle’s credit, Oracle’s leadership not only seems to accept that social media is A Thing, but embrace that it’s the coming Big Thing.

The question, of course, is whether Oracle’s brand of social media will be embraced by users. Oracle seems to get that they have to appeal to enterprise customers rather than consumers- but is enterprise ready to go social? Or is this an idea ahead of its time? Only time will tell, but I think most of us techies can agree that Oracle made a good move by stepping in to this growing area of interest.

Ahhhh, OpenWorld. That glorious week long convergence of geekery and aggressive business in the glorious city of San Francisco. Part conference, part trade show, part pep rally, part reunion and part music festival, over 37,000 people are likely to attend the at least some part of the gathering this year.

So, what can we expect out of Oracle OpenWorld 2012?

Some things never change. As with most years, we can expect a regular rotation of off-color comments from Larry Ellison, lots of cute, well-endowed booth babes with mega-watt smiles staffing the exhibition hall and likely at least one performance by a musical “has been” who doesn’t seem entirely sure where they are.

There are a few things unique to this year though, of course. For example, Oracle will be tying in a music festival featuring Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon with OpenWorld. Credit where credit is due, that’s pretty nifty. Some other predictions for this year’s OpenWorld:

• A preview of Oracle’s new generation database – The final version probably won’t be ready until December at the earliest, but I’m willing to bet attendees will be getting an enthusiastic sneak-peak.

• New products- Last year, Oracle revealed both Exalytics and the Big Data Appliance at OpenWorld. Most years, they have something new to drop—this year likely won’t be any different. I’m not sure any new hardware will be announced this year, though.

• Enough cloud to tick off Zeus—Not only will everything be Oracle Cloud this and Oracle Cloud that, but at some point during the key note, Larry Ellison will force everyone to repeat after him slowly, “Oracle has always loved the cloud, and the cloud has always loved Oracle” moments before a banner descends behind him proclaiming that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

What are your predictions for OpenWorld 2012? If you have any insight you would like to share, please send it to editor@searchoracle.com

The conference has thousands of sessions on the various products Oracle and other related vendors have to offer. It is chock-full of sessions that include direct end user insights on their implementations of various projects such as Exadata, Fusion Applications, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, J.D. Edwards, Oracle Database 11g and MySQL, and others.

Of course, having so much can be confusing – sometimes it is tough to filter through everything and find what you want. So in addition to checking out the OpenWorld Schedule Builder, here are a few tips on what’s happening this year at OpenWorld, and what sessions I, readers and members of our advisory board are attending.

Let’s first take a look at expected announcements. At Oracle’s most recent earnings call, CEO Lawrence Ellison said the company planned on announcing four engineered systems in the near future. Since then, Oracle has announced the  Oracle Database Appliance and the Sparc SuperCluster T4-4. So what will the other two be?

All indications are that one of them will be something code-named Exalytics. Yes, another Exa- device. According to IT Consultant Scott Tiazkun, the product will be an engineeered system built for business analytics. Tiazkun isn’t too high on it, pointing to what he thinks has been little success with Oracle’s major systems announcement last year, Exalogic.

Ellison also said at the company’s last earnings call that Oracle will be announcing a big data engineered system related to and using Hadoop, a popular open-source big data platform. There have since been reports that the announcement will be an Oracle NoSQL database that includes in-memory features as well.

As for the other engineered system that Oracle will announce, who knows? Last year, IDC analyst Al Hilway predicted that Oracle would come out with something this year called ExaFusion – that is, a server appliance for Fusion Applications. So that is a possibility.

As for me, I’ll be there Sunday to Thursday and attending sessions on Exadata, Exalogic, Fusion Applications, E-Business Suite and other Oracle ERP applications, and more. My colleague Barney Beal will be covering CRM and other Oracle news. We’ll also have folks covering the JavaOne conference as well.

I heard from a couple readers this week who said they were interested in sessions on Oracle Database, MySQL and cloud computing. As for some of our advisory board members:

Vinod Haval from Bank of America will be taking part in several sessions, including an Exadata customer panel and Q&A as well as being a guest speaker at the Oracle Enterprise Architecture Summit. He is looking forward to the keynote addresses and data warehousing sessions.

Sarah Novotny from Blue Gecko will be orchestrating, presenting at and attending community talks and sessions around MySQL. She will also be staffing the MySQL community kiosk in the User Group Pavilion. On Monday she is speaking at a session called “Operational Wins in MySQL 5.5.”

On Monday SearchOracle.com will publish a conference landing page where you’ll be able to find the best comprehensive coverage of OpenWorld, Oracle Develop and JavaOne. Check it out.

To win, you must submit a video explaining why you deserve to get the free pass. The video must be 30 seconds or less and be posted on YouTube. One person will win a free pass to Oracle OpenWorld, and two people will win free passes to JavaOne and Oracle Develop. The contest started last week and ends soon on Aug. 9, so if you want to enter, you have to act quickly.

The community will pick the five finalists in each category. Then a group of Oracle judges will pick the winners out of the finalists. Winners will be notified around Aug. 11, and their names made public Aug. 21.

There is a bonus just to submitting. Everyone who submits an entry will get a discount code to pay the early bird price at registration. That’s a $400 savings over the normal on-site price.