Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison used the company’s annual conference for developers, partners and customers to set the stage for a familiar act: bashing Amazon.
In a keynote speech at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference, Ellison repeatedly ripped the company’s chief rival in the cloud sector while introducing a new autonomous database.
The database uses machine learning to automatically tune performance and adjust compute and storage requirements without human intervention. It also automatically detects and responds to cyberattacks in real time, Ellison said.
Available starting this December, the so-called “self driving database” is designed to automate a lot of the meticulous work required to run a modern database, allowing developers to have more time to concentrate on their apps.
And Ellison promised it would be cheaper and faster to use its database on Oracle’s cloud services or on-premise than Amazon’s database offering for the cloud called RedShift.
“We guarantee you contractually to cut your Amazon bill in half,” Ellison said Sunday during his keynote, according to CIO Today.
Throughout his keynote, Ellison peppered jabs directly aimed at Amazon. It’s also not the first time that Ellison has used his company’s OpenWorld Conference to swipe at Amazon. Last year, Ellison predicted “Amazon’s lead is over” in the so-called infrastructure-as-a-service-market. At the time, Oracle was introducing a new version of its cloud infrastructure service.
But Amazon’s grip on the market remains firm. Last week, research firm Gartner released a report concluding that Amazon owned 44 percent of the IaaS market in 2016, up from 39.8 percent a year earlier. Oracle, on the other hand, can lay claim to only 0.3 percent of the sector, up from 0.1 percent in 2015.
Oracle has taken an aggressive approach in response to Amazon’s continued market dominance.
Most recently, Oracle rolled out a new cloud pricing plan that gives discounts to Oracle database customers who move their databases to the cloud. The autonomous database is the second part of a plan to make Oracle’s database run for 50 percent less cost on Oracle’s cloud than on Amazons.
While Amazon may control a huge slice of the IaaS cloud market, Oracle appears to be relying on its strength and long history in the area of databases to try and sway legacy customers to its cloud. The autonomous database will be a key part in that strategy.
“This is the most important thing we have done in a long, long time,” Ellison said.
