Even Amazon, with all its resources, is having difficulty with the transition, says Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison. Give that man a microphone and he trashes AWS, every time.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

December 18, 2018

2 Min Read
Oracle's Ellison: No 'Normal Person' Would Move From Us to Amazon

It wouldn't be a public appearance for Larry Ellison without him trashing Amazon Web Services.

On an earnings call Monday, the pugilistic Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) co-founder, CTO and chairman said Amazon Web Services Inc. 's Aurora database is just MySQL running on AWS cloud. AWS Redshift is also open source. The only competitive advantage to both is that they run on AWS.

Figure 1:Photo: Oracle PR Hartmann Studios [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia CommonsPhoto: Oracle PR Hartmann Studios [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

By contrast, he said, "The Oracle Autonomous Database is the biggest technology lead we've ever had."

He added, "There is no way a normal person would move from an Oracle database to an Amazon database. It's just incredibly expensive and complicated and you've got to be willing to give up tons of reliability, tons of security, tons of performance to go ahead and do it," he said.

Amazon is doing just that, moving its main business from Oracle to AWS, a process which is nearly complete. AWS CEO Andy Jassy used Twitter last month to take a potshot at Oracle and Ellison. (See 'Keep Talkin' Larry' – AWS CEO Trolls Oracle's Ellison, as Amazon Dumps Oracle.)

But Amazon has found it difficult moving off Oracle to AWS, which Amazon is doing at Founder/CEO Jeff Bezos's command, Ellison says. That process has been ongoing for years. Amazon, with all its resources, is "dedicated to doing this and they're not even there yet. Nobody else is going to go through this kind of forced march if [even] Amazon can't get there, with their resources."

But it wasn't all name-calling on Monday's earnings call. Oracle reported $9.6 billion revenue for its most recent quarter -- virtually flat year-over-year, despite a booming cloud market. Oracle executives said its cloud applications business is booming, however, and the Autonomous Cloud business is poised to take off, and those two will be strategic to Oracle's future. (See How Long Will Oracle Just Tread Water?)

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— Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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