Oracle founder swipes at AWS as cloud business surges

Cloud business surges but share price sinks following Q1 results

Oracle founder Larry Ellison has made his customary dig at Amazon Web Services (AWS) following the release of Oracle's quarterly results, which saw its cloud revenue jump 51 per cent.

For the three months ending 31 August 2017, Oracle's cloud revenue rose to $1.5bn - making up 16 per cent of the vendor's overall quarterly revenue.

Despite the cloud improvement, Oracle's on-premises software still made up 65 per cent of the overall $9.2bn quarterly revenue.

Oracle's on-premises revenue was flat at $5.9bn, but new software licensing was down six per cent to $996m.

Speaking on an earnings call, a transcript of which can be found on Seeking Alpha, 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," he said. "AWS can't do any of this stuff.

"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."

Despite the cloud improvement, Oracle's share price fell as much as five per cent following the results, reportedly as a result of weaker-than-expected guidance for Q2.

On the earnings call Ellison also ruled out the possibility of acquisitions in the near future.

"There is no one left to buy," he said. "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."

Oracle made its last major acquisition when it acquired NetSuite for over $9bn last summer.