Larry Ellison Takes Another Aim At AWS

That AWS is firmly in his crosshair now should come as no surprise, as Larry Ellison, the Oracle chairman took several minutes to disparage his chief rivals in the cloud market.

At the Oracle OpenWorld conference keynote last night.

Ellison, while introduced the company’s new autonomous database, couldn’t resist going after Amazon Web Services. The company is currently far behind AWS in the race for cloud supremacy, but that did not stop the cofounder and executive chairman of Oracle from taking shots at AWS.

As a matter of pure fact, he spent almost half his time talking about Amazon Web Services as he did his own products, in the hour he spent in front of thousands of his company’s most important customers Sunday evening.

He was essentially announcing the autonomous database product that was first mentioned during the company’s last earnings calls — the Oracle 18c Autonomous Database.

Available this December, this new solution is designed to automate a lot of the painstaking maintenance work that is required to run a modern database by using machine learning to automate the human labor involved in database maintenance, like patching and tuning.

All while offering a 99.995% uptime guarantee, which works out to 30 minutes of planned or unplanned downtime a year. The database even repairs itself, in case it becomes corrupted somehow, and has the extremely handy ability to fix the error and move on, all on its own.

An impressive enough product that stands on its own, without the need to slam AWS in the process. But Ellison still did, mentioning that Amazon contractual guarantees were false claims as they excluded things like software bugs, security patches and configuration changes.

He also spent a good portion of this time on stage attacking Amazon Redshift, the data warehousing product, which he claimed was inflexible, expensive, and sneaky, with a service level agreement that was full of loopholes regarding its uptime promise. No details were provided, however.

After highlighting all the faults of Redshift, and AWS in general, Ellison made his biggest appeal on price, saying that Oracle guarantees that it can cut database costs in half, compared to Amazon Web Services, when using its new database on either its own cloud, or on-premises.

Spending all this time ripping a competitor to open your biggest event of the year is quite telling. Then again, perhaps not, when you are Ellison, as the outspoken executive has been performing variations of this act for years now comparing his products and services competitors, aggressively and insistently.