Oracle founder Larry Ellison has swung his mighty handbag of sarcasm at Amazon Web Services (AWS) again following the release of Oracle’s quarterly results.
Oracle saw its cloud revenue jump 51 percent this quarter, so he must have been feeling a bit smug.
Oracle’s cloud revenue rose to $1.5 billion – making up 16 per cent of the vendor’s overall quarterly revenue.
Ellison took a shot at public cloud giant AWS ahead of the launch of Oracle’s automated cloud database products. Ellison claimed these solutions will have downtime of less than 30 minutes a year.
“To achieve that level of reliability, Oracle has to automatically tune, patch, and upgrade itself, while the system is running. AWS can’t do any of this stuff”, he claimed.
“Perhaps the most interesting aspect of autonomous systems… [and] on our new self-driving database are the economics that surround total automation.
“Customers moving from Amazon’s Redshift [database product] to Oracle’s autonomous databases can expect to cut their cost in half or more and Oracle will be providing SLAs that guarantee those cost settings to customers that move.”
He would have been less smug about Oracle’s on-premises software still made up 65 percent of the overall $9.2 billion quarterly revenue.
In fact Oracle’s on-premises revenue was flat at $5.9 billion, but new software licensing was down six per cent to $996 million.
Oracle shareholders were less interested in Ellision’s anti-amazon digs as the outfit’s share price fell as much as five per cent following the results, reportedly as a result of weaker-than-expected guidance for Q2.
Ellison ruled out the possibility of acquisitions in the near future because “there is no one left to buy”.
“It’s not like, as we focus on the cloud, there are a bunch of obvious targets we can go out and buy. We’re seeing our best growth in technology that we have developed internally.”
