He also unveiled Oracle's new Exalytics data analysis machine, "hardware and software engineered to deliver data analysis at the speed of thought," Ellison said at the OpenWorld conference, which is expected to attract more than 40,000 people. With its multi-billion purchase of Sun Microsystems last year, Oracle is aggressively stepping into the hardware business and competing against vendors including former partner Hewlett-Packard. Ellison spent much of his speech pitching the idea of parallel computing, where computers are built with multiple processors and other components that work simultaneously, improving overall performance. Oracle so far has installed 1,000 of its Exadata database machines with customers and sales are going well, he said. Oracle has long compete with European software giant SAP AG and IBM in the business software and database products markets. Copyright Reuters, 2011