Larry Ellison, Oracle’s former chief executive and current executive chairman and chief technology officer, has an ambitious vision for his Redwood, California, company. In an over hour-long speech Sunday at the company’s annual customer conference in San Francisco, Ellison predicted Oracle would soon give Amazon stiff competition insofar as providing computing services through the cloud is concerned.
“We’re in the middle of a generational change — from on-premise computing — to super data centers called clouds,” Ellison reportedly said. “Amazon’s lead is over. Amazon’s going to have serious competition going forward.”
The company announced “Cloud@Customer,” which takes the latest gear from its own data centers and puts that hardware on customer data centers, executive chairman Larry Ellison said Sunday during a presentation at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Customers won’t need to buy the technology, and can instead subscribe to the service on a monthly basis, just like they would do if they were buying from a distant data center. He also announced what he said were more powerful products at a lower cost than Amazon, the leading public cloud provider and the company’s No. 1 competitor in infrastructure.
“We’ll put that part of the Oracle cloud behind your firewall, where it’s more protected and adheres to certain statutory requirements,” Ellison said. “The Cloud@Customer machines are identical.”
As things stand, though, Amazon’s lead appears unassailable. The company, which debuted its Amazon Web Services (AWS) ten years ago, is currently the leader in the cloud infrastructure business. According to a recent report by the information technology research firm Gartner, AWS’ flagship S3 cloud storage service is 1.6 times as large as the other seven public cloud providers — a list consisting of Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba, Rackspace, Oracle and AT&T.
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