The Hudson Theater here in New York was a fitting location for Oracle’s U.S.-based Applications Unlimited event given the theatrics surrounding it.

The blaring music and slides with customer quotes extolling the virtue of Oracle products are all pretty standard, but releasing five new products at once is ambitious — or confusing. Given the number of applications Oracle is steering through production, maybe it shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

Siebel 8.0, J.D. Edwards Enterprise One 8.12, J.D. Edwards A 9.1, PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.0 and Oracle E-Business Suite 12, are all being unveiled today with events also taking place in Mexico City, Paris, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo and Dubai.

Of course, the day wouldn’t be complete without a shot at SAP. Fred Studer, an Oracle executive, took to the stage as MC, and immediately went into attack mode. Feigning an interest in the attendee list, he noted one person from SAP.

“Is Mark here, oh Mark there you are,” he said. “We have a seat up front for you. Oracle’s an open company.”

We’ll be following up with coverage of today’s event later today and coverage of Siebel 8.0 tomorrow.

– Barney Beal, News Director