Oracle’s co-CEO Mark Hurd has laid in to Amazon Web Services calling the company’s infrastructure ‘old’.
Speaking at a Goldman Sacks Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, the co-CEO said that “Amazon’s infrastructure, to be very blunt, is old,” while claiming its own technology is “newer and fresher.”
Hurd’s Oracle, which is considered to be a long distance away from the dominant market share that AWS holds, has been talking a good game about its potential in the cloud computing market.
The company has frequently boasted about its broad depth of services and ability to match or beat AWS when it comes to pricing. While Big Red may well have a case to state, it’s slow embracing of the cloud has left it trailing in the wake of AWS, Microsoft and Google, all of whom control a bigger market share.
However, Oracle is talking a good game and Hurd said: “We sold more cloud recurring revenue than anyone in the industry, bar none.”
Oracle’s financial results certainly make for impressive reading, at least when looking at the growth of its cloud revenue, which in the quarter ended November grew by 62% to $1.05bn.
That’s a long way off the $3.5bn AWS brought in for the fourth quarter at a 47% growth rate.
Yes the growth rate of Oracle is higher than that of AWS but it’s more difficult to grow an already large market than it is a small one, so these figures should be taken with a pinch of salt.
While Oracle has frequently taken to speaking out against AWS, the business unit of Amazon has typically stayed quiet, although it has taken to poking at Oracle when it comes to Big Red’s database products.
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However, Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, recently spoke about the competitive landscape in the cloud at a talk at the University of Washington.
The CEO was questioned about why Google and Microsoft had taken a different approach to AWS, on vendor lock-in and the prospects for Oracle and IBM.
Jassy said, as reported by GeekWire: “I think there’s a second category of large technology companies that just took an ungodly long time to get there. These are companies like Oracle and IBM, some of those folks.”
“They pooh-poohed it and they said, first no one will use it, then maybe only startups will use it, and they won’t use it for anything real, then enterprises will never use it, then enterprises will never use it for anything mission-critical. Companies and developers voted with their workloads, and so now they’re in this spot of trying to spin something up. It’s six, seven years late.”
