Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has at least two things in common with his close friend Steve Jobs: his new found love of integrated hardware and software systems, and a ready willingness to diss competitors.

Ellison displayed both attributes during his keynote address here late Wednesday afternoon at his company's Oracle OpenWorld conference.

The colorful CEO pounded repeatedly on the message that with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is now able to offer well-engineered, integrated systems that give it a competitive edge.

"Sunday's announcement of our Exalogic Elastic 'cloud-in-a-box' is our second major project of integrating our software with next-generation hardware," Ellison said. "And it's engineered the right way, to be more reliable, faster and more secure than other systems. It's like the iPhone."

"Steve Jobs is my best friend and I love him dearly, and I watch what he does very closely," Ellison continued. "If you engineer the hardware and software together it just works better."

Unlike some of his past OpenWorld keynotes, when he left plenty of time for a question-and-answer session with the audience, Ellison spent the bulk of his time giving an extended presentation of Oracle's latest product offerings and an update on the ambitious Fusion software project that is set for a partial release later this year and general availability in the first quarter of 2011. He also elaborated on critical remarks he made about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) during OpenWorld's official kickoff Sunday.