Amazon's lead is over, Larry Ellison declares as he promises IaaS onslaught

Oracle founder goes after Amazon in opening OpenWorld keynote

Oracle will aggressively go after the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space in the next year, the software giant's founder vowed as he declared that "Amazon's lead is over".

During his opening keynote at the ongoing Oracle OpenWorld event taking place this week in San Francisco, the company founder - who now serves as its chief technology officer - acknowledged that the use of cloud services "has been pioneered by Amazon.com". He went on tell attendees that his firm's competitive landscape has changed drastically over the last half-decade.

"Our major competitors today - our number-one and number-two competitors today - are Amazon for infrastructure, and Workday for applications. On a daily basis, those are the two companies we see, as opposed to IBM for infrastructure and SAP for applications. This is a breathtaking change, and it really shows that people are moving from buying on-premise to buying in the cloud. [We have] a whole new set of competitors," he said.

Ellison (pictured above) ran through the three core segments of cloud - software-, platform-, and infrastructure-as-a-service - and claimed that Oracle has been in the SaaS space for some time, before it started playing in the PaaS world when "we graduated on to offering our database as a service".

"This coming year will see us moving aggressively into infrastructure-as-a-service - [which is] the third leg on the stool," he added. "We have made incredible progress in the last couple of years in improving the quality, the cost, and the performance of our IaaS."

The CTO went on to bullishly talk up his company's cloud proposition, while aiming frequent barbs at Amazon Web Services. He claimed that, unlike Oracle, the public cloud market's leader is a restrictive company for end users to work with.

"The Oracle database not only runs on the Oracle cloud, it runs on Amazon, it runs on Microsoft Azure, it runs anywhere you want to take it, pretty much. [It is] so fascinating to me that Amazon has decided you really should only run their database on Amazon. In fact, if you try to run their database someplace else, it just wouldn't work," he said. "If you look at the networking costs of most clouds, it is very cheap to move the data in, and very expensive to move the data out. Some people would call that the ultimate lock-in."

Ellison claimed that Oracle's "new, second-generation datacentres" offer customers more than twice as many cores, twice the memory, upwards of four times as much storage, and in excess of 10 times as much I/O capacity as its chief competitor.

"But you have to be willing to pay less," he joked.

Although he made repeated references to how much he respected a company he admitted was "the first mover, and the innovator in this space", the Oracle frontman kept returning to the same - characteristically pugnacious - message.

"Amazon's lead is over," he said. "Amazon is going to have serious competition going forward."