Oracle Open World 2011 kicked off this week, and SiliconANGLE will be delivering live coverage and analysis all throughout the event.  We’ve already had some fun with CEO Larry Ellison’s keynote from last night, which set the tone for the event spanning the next couple of days.

As the conference gets under way, we can recap on some of the updates that have already been published, as well as where Oracle has been heading to date.  The company’s license revenue grew by 17 percent last quarter, and the Exadata database appliance remains to be a key focus and money generator.  The latter is nothing new, but it’s interesting in context to the company’s new product debuted by CEO Larry Ellison in his rather clumsy keynote.

Oracle unveiled an in-memory big data analytics appliance it calls Exalytics, the successor of last year’s Exalogic ‘cloud in a box’.   It’s based on technology from Times Ten, a company Oracle acquired in ’05, and runs NoSQL on a parallel hardware configuration. The expectations around it, however, are not particularly high.

As Wikibon’s Jeff Kelly commented, NoSQL and the open aspect of big data represent a threat to Exadata, which remains the tech giant’s core data offering.  Oracle’s technology is closed source and runs on Sun hardware, in comparison to the open-source Hadoop.  It can also scale well to cope with the growing amounts of data customer  will be processing, which is why Kelly believes the company won’t invest substantially in Exalytics in the future, and probably won’t make pushes to expand its customer base.

Oracle’s approach has been very successful so far, and while it may encounter some difficulties on the longer run should it fail to adapt, OracleWorld and the company itself have been going strong so far.  Partner GridIron announced TurboCharger, a data accelerator appliance aimed at Oracle customers that packs some patent-pending tech that, according to TurboCharger, can speed up storage performance by up to 100 times.