Oracle executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said his company is taking aim at Amazon’s industry-leading cloud infrastructure service with a “new generation” of data centres that offer more performance at a lower cost than Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
“Amazon’s lead is over,” he said at the opening keynote of Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco on Sunday evening. “Amazon is going to have serious competition going forward.”
But Ellison said its cloud would offer better integration of cloud infrastructure, platform and application layers than competitors.
“Oracle competes at all three levels of the cloud, all three tiers of the cloud,” he said.
While Oracle is better known for platform- and application-level offerings, Ellison focused on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), saying Oracle Cloud’s newer data centres are faster and cheaper than AWS.
“Our new second-generation data centres offer twice as many cores as Amazon, twice as much memory as Amazon, four times as much storage as Amazon, and more than 10 times the I/O capacity of Amazon,” he said. “But you have to be willing to pay less. If you’re not willing to pay less, you can’t place the order.”
He also emphasised artificial intelligence services, including machine learning, introducing AI tools called Adaptive Intelligence Applications that build on the data Oracle holds on consumers – which he said is more than that held by Facebook.
Oracle has built up its holdings of marketing data in recent years through acquisitions such as those of Datalogix and BlueKai.
He introduced the second release of Oracle Database 12c and other cloud platform and application services including a new, faster database-as-a-service (DBaaS), a service for managing containers on the public cloud, and a mobile cloud that supports chatbots.
The service provides hardware “identical” to that running on Oracle’s own data centres, and which is managed by Oracle, while allowing customers to keep their data behind their own firewall and adhere to particular legal requirements that bind some industries, Ellison said.
Many European organisations find it difficult to shift to the cloud due to outdated thinking habits or restrictive funding models, Oracle said last month, recomending companies undergo a “cultural transformation” in order to benefit from the cloud.
Cloud services are hosted on flexible infrastructure that enables the use of a subscription model where users pay only for what they need, potentially lowering costs.
How much do you know about the cloud? Try our quiz!
British regulator invites feedback on major partnerships Microsoft and Amazon have struck with smaller AI…
Another 20 staff have been fired by Google over Israel protest and their “completely unacceptable…
Censorship row brewing down under, after the Australian Prime Minister calls Elon Musk an 'arrogant…
Financial regulator asks New York judge to impose $5.3 billion in fines against Terraform Labs…
Lightweight artificial intelligence model launched this week by Microsoft, offering more cost-effective option for Azure…
ByteDance protest falls on deaf ears, as Senate passes TikTok ban or divest bill, with…