News

Oracle Gunning for AWS with 'Faster' Autonomous Database at '1/10th the Cost'

• By David Ramel
• 03/26/2018

Although not often mentioned as a cloud leader with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, Oracle has repeatedly taken pot shots at AWS in promoting its own cloud service.

For years Oracle execs such as Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd have verbally targeted AWS as they seek to gain traction in the cloud platform market, long dominated by AWS, with Ellison in 2016 claiming "Amazon's lead is over."

And more recently, in an earnings call transcribed by Seeking Alpha last week, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd continued to maintain some of its offering were cheaper and better.

Speaking of Oracle's Exadata autonomous database, Hurd said, "It runs multiples of times faster than Amazon."

Hurd said the company expects most of its customers are going to move to the autonomous database, which he said "is the only database on the planet that requires no human labor to administer." Oracle is positioning the autonomous database as a better and cheaper alternative to AWS, claiming it can "cut your Amazon bill in half" in a post titled "You’re Spending Too Much on AWS."

The Oracle CEO expounded on that idea in last week's earning call.

"Now -- okay Oracle’s got a faster database than Amazon, it's no big surprise there," Hurd said. "But the interesting thing Amazon charges by the minute and we charge by the minute is our prices are essentially the same or close enough. If we run 10 times faster, we are 1/10 the cost of Amazon database and that's what it is. So I mean we’ve been all the public benchmarks are, you can go and look at them, we're 1/10 the cost.

"We automatically apply security patches, we eliminate human labor, it's a huge benefit to our customers to move to the autonomous database, it just went live a couple of weeks ago and we expect it’s going to change the profile of our company forever."

Nevertheless, as the following graphic from RightScale's 2018 State of the Cloud Report shows, Oracle still has a long way to go to catch up to AWS and other leaders

Oracle announced its autonomous database last October and, as reported by The Motley Fool, Ellison in a previous earnings call compared it to Amazon Redshift, the AWS data warehousing solution.

"In a series of published benchmark tests the Amazon Redshift database on average costs five times more to run the same exact amount of work as the Oracle Autonomous Database," he said.