The changes in 11g are key, he stressed. For example, many Oracle users who were once BEA customers and are used to using the Eclipse application development platform have a difficult choice ahead, since middleware 11g is tightly integrated with Oracle's JDeveloper.

"[Customers] need to look at JDeveloper and say, 'are the potential productivity gains worth the sacrifices I'm going to make,'" Rymer said.

11g middleware also underpins Fusion Applications, Oracle's next-generation suite of business software that is supposed to combine the best features of its various product lines.

While Fusion Applications' release date has been a moving target for years, company officials of late have indicated they will be generally available in 2010.

"If you're interested in Fusion Apps, this is your world," Rymer said. "[JDeveloper] is the way you will customize them."

What remains to be seen is what Oracle will do with the many middleware and hardware products it will acquire through the pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Oracle spokespeople declined comment Wednesday.

But in remarks at Wednesday's event, Oracle President Charles Phillips did allude to the deal, and offered a vague glimpse of what is to come.

"There's a lot of things we can do as we bring in the silicon and the storage," he said. "Some things that are currently in software probably should be embedded in devices. ... Some things should be on silicon itself, like encryption. Some things should be on the storage level."

Overall, Phillips' remarks reflected the general forward-looking vision Oracle has developed of late, wherein it will provide customers with a complete stack, from hardware to middleware and applications.

That theme and Wednesday's announcements sparked some trash talk from one competitor.

"For end-users who want to capitulate and give up on IT as a provider of competitive differentiation, this might seem like a way of reducing cost and complexity," said Miko Matsumura, chief strategist of SOA vendor Software AG, in a blog post. "In the short term, they will be able to reduce their costs by eliminating most of their IT departments."

"However, in the long term, being beholden to the Dark Lord Sauron ... will prove to be expensive," he added, in a reference to the supervillain from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.