In addition, Oracle will make a cloud pitch of sorts to customers looking to upgrade their on-premises installations. A session will cover Oracle Consulting Cloud Environments, which give customers "access to virtualized Oracle Applications environments (including Oracle Fusion; Oracle E-Business Suite; and Oracle's PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel product lines) as well as Oracle Consulting tools and accelerators," according to the description. These tools will include "prebuilt conversions, interfaces, test scripts, project templates, product documentation, and business process maps," which can help speed up the upgrade process, it adds.

Wall Street has been eyeing Oracle's hardware business closely since the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which was completed in early 2010. Ellison and others have said repeatedly that the company is most interested in selling higher-margin "engineered systems" like the Exadata database machine and Exalogic application server, which combine its hardware and software for various computing workloads, and is reluctant to compete in the commodity server market.

Last year at OpenWorld, the Big Data Appliance and Exalytics machines.

The OpenWorld session catalog doesn't appear to spill the beans on any additional systems to be announced at the show, but Oracle plans to closely align Fusion Applications with Exadata and Exalogic. One session describes those products as the "ultimate platform" for deploying its next-generation Fusion Applications. Speculation has also swirled in the past that Oracle would eventually ship Fusion Applications pre-installed on its appliances; this session could reflect a step in that direction.