KEY POINTS:
The random facts scrolling across the screen as the thumping music and mood lighting prepared the audience for the arrival of Michael Dell on stage at OpenWorld served to show just how well under way Dell's regeneration as a computer maker is.
We learnt that the Austin-based company that so staunchly embraced the direct-selling model sells more than one computer every second. In the 45-odd minutes Dell stood on stage his company cracked out orders for at least 2700 computers.
Dell has gone from US$10 billion in sales outside the US to US$25 billion in sales in five years, sells to 96 per cent of Fortune 500 companies and handles a billion customer interactions a year via phone, email and the internet.
As the company showed today, it has also started to produce smarter-looking computers, none more so than the XPS M1330, a beautiful little laptop.
I'd never have considered buying a Dell laptop until the XPS came along and I had my M1330 resting on my knee as Michael Dell unveiled a couple of new additions to Dell's consumer line.
He showed off the Latitude XT, Dell's first tablet PC, which Michael Dell said was the thinnest in the 12.1 inch category and we also saw an all-in-one PC along the lines of HP's .
The appearance of the tablet suggest that the laptop with reversible screen that runs on a special Tablet edition of Windows, is finally mainstream.
A new technology called Multi-touch which allows multiple points of contact on a computer touch screen to be recognised was also demonstrated - it would seem to have huge potential for touch-display computer screens that are already in common use with the current generation tablet PCs.
A slick PR video tried to convince viewers they were part of the Re-generation, a generation leading on from the 'Me generation- and one concerned about the environment and creating a sustainable world.
It was a bit gimmicky, but Dell is backing up its green rhetoric with action - it plans to be carbon neutral by the end of 2008. How exactly it will do that wasn't explained, but Michael Dell said the company was coming up with a "greenprint" that was aimed at helping its customers join the green movement and it would be released shortly.
"I challenge every company to join us in this commitment," said Michael Dell of the carbon-neutral stance. New Dell servers that cut power usage by 23 per cent were also previewed as Dell recycled a Gartner statistic that predicts that 70 per cent of businesses will experience power brownouts due to energy constraints by 2011.
"Gartner is predicting the future is brown. That's completely unacceptable. The future should be green," said Dell.
By the time Larry Ellison returned to the stage for his closing keynote, dry Powerpoint slides at hand, there wasn't a person in the audience who wasn't keen to join the Re-generation. Ellison pushed his new Oracle VM virtualisation software again before getting into the nuts and bolts of the company's revamped Fusion middleware platform which will feature things like service-oriented architecture, enterprise performance management and business intelligence.
The first applications are due in the first part of next year and some demos of salesforce automation software incorporating some funky mash-up elements looked pretty interesting.
As geeky questions flew at Ellison from the floor, one conference goer paused to ask Ellison what company he was going to buy next.
"Go ahead and email me. I'll tell you, but if you buy the stock, you have to split the profit with me," was Ellison's reply. Despite the software industry consolidation Ellison has had more of a hand than most in propelling forward, he didn't think he was eliminating the competition through acquisition.
Said Ellison: "Even if we buy aggressively for the next 20 years there's going to be more competition than we can deal with."
And finally, as he answered a question about what Oracle's software might look like years out, in 2025, a frank remark that "I won't be around" to see it.
The 63 year old (according to Wikipedia), was simply pointing out the obvious, but it came as a reminder that for all the manoeuvring, innovating and acquiring the Oracle creator has done over the decades, it all has to come to an end for him at some stage, even if it's hard to imagine Oracle without him.
