Larry Ellison's five boldest brags on Oracle's latest earnings call
The Oracle chairman went on the offensive against AWS and other rivals as the vendor beat quarterly revenue estimates by $150m
Oracle chairman Larry Ellison was in typical chest-beating mode on Oracle's latest earning call, on which the software giant announced a two per cent annual hike in Q1 revenues.
Its top line for the three months ended 31 August 2020 hit $9.4bn in constant currency, $150m higher than the mid-range of its estimates.
Q1 GAAP operating income also rose 12 per cent year on year to $3.2bn.
The "fantastic" quarterly results were underpinned by surging spend on Oracle's cloud offering, CEO Safra Katz claimed, with Fusion ERP up 33 per cent and NetSuite ERP up 23 per cent. Its business with Zoom doubled quarter on quarter after the fast-growing videoconferencing outfit selected Oracle as its IaaS platform in April.
Despite Oracle ranking outside the ‘Leaders' quadrant in Gartner's latest cloud infrastructure Magic Quadrant, Ellison went on the offensive against AWS and Oracle's other cloudy rivals on the call.
Here we round up his five boldest statements on how Oracle is faring against its key competitors in the earnings release and during the the call, a transcript of which can be found here.
On Oracle having "the best" IaaS platform on the market, according to IDC…
"I believe that the Oracle Cloud offers better Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) technology than any other cloud vendor. The really good news here is that I'm not the only one who thinks that's true...
"In the 2020 Industry CloudPath survey that IDC recently released where it surveyed 935 IaaS customers, on their satisfaction with top IaaS vendors, including Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and Google. Oracle IaaS, OCI, received the highest satisfaction score and the biggest year over year score increase of all IaaS vendors."
On Oracle's number of datacentre regions vs AWS…
"OCI cloud datacentres are opening all over the world at a record pace. We now have 26 OCI regions live around the world, edging out Amazon AWS, which currently has 24 regions. And we'll be adding at least another 10 regions in the next nine months. We're not slowing down."
On Zoom recently selecting Oracle as its IaaS platform…
"I suspect…Zoom picking Oracle infrastructure surprised a lot of people in the recent past.
"…I think Zoom is a great example because it proves that the Oracle Cloud is secure, reliable, high performant and economical… That was just purely an evaluation of our cloud versus Microsoft's versus Google's versus Amazon's."
On Oracle's speed vs rivals…
"And another example of [Oracle's cloud winning in bake offs] is high-performance computing, car companies simulating crashes. Now, why would anyone go to the Oracle Cloud to do high-performance computing when you can go to Google or you can go to Microsoft or you can go to AWS?
"Well, because we're much faster, therefore -- we're much, much faster. And therefore, they get the simulations done faster, but they've got to be willing to pay less… Half the car companies around the world are now either using our high-performance computing or evaluating our high-performance computing because we benchmark so well against the competition. And this is all new business, like the video conferencing business."
On old Oracle rival SAP…
"Historically, it would be hard to push a door of an SAP customer... But now we find that many of those doors are not only can be - [but] basically are - already open for us. So, as the only provider of ERP in the cloud for large, medium-large companies, the Fusion products are really taking off. And so, we've been replacing not only our own products and other companies, but we've made a significant foothold in SAP customers simply because they're really very frustrated with their - with the vendors that they have installed on-premise."