Oracle CTO Larry Ellison told investors gleefully this week that a major new customer, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), was migrating its AWS Redshift database onto Oracle’s cloud. Startlingly – and perhaps troublingly for investors – this simply wasn’t true, Computer Business Review can reveal.

The DTCC would be a big win for any technology vendor: a centralised clearinghouse for more than 50 financial exchanges, it underpins [pdf] a wealth of post-trade services including clearing, settlements, and more, across asset classes from bonds to equities; the firm processes over 90 million financial transactions daily.

Ellison was understandably pleased to have landed it as a customer.

He told analysts on Oracle’s Q3 earnings call (“now this one is interesting”) that “DTCC is migrating their multi-terabyte Amazon AWS Redshift system out of Amazon and into our public cloud using the Oracle Autonomous Database”, adding, “they’re also moving their analytics from Amazon to the Oracle Analytics suite.”

The public feud between AWS and Oracle has been well documented; we won’t rehash it here. Suffice to say that against a backdrop of bad blood, and with Oracle’s newly aggressive cloud ambitions, the company’s co-founder publicly saying Oracle had managed to steal database/cloud business from AWS was newsworthy.

Computer Business Review (perhaps naively expecting that while a little bombast can be expected on an earnings call, patently erroneous claims from a blue chip should not be), ran the comments without initially confirming them with DTCC. We, and Ellison, stand corrected: his claims were deeply inaccurate, the firm said.

Oracle DTCC AWS“DTCC does not have any plans to move applications from AWS to Oracle”

DTCC told Computer Business Review in an emailed comment: “On March 12, 2020, Oracle inaccurately reported during its Q3 earnings call that DTCC was migrating a ‘multi-terabyte data warehouse’ from Amazon Web Services to Oracle’s public cloud service. DTCC uses AWS to support a variety of business functions, and DTCC does not have any plans to move applications from AWS to Oracle.” [Our italics].

The company added: “DTCC employs a number of Oracle products, including Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Analytics Cloud, which support DTCC’s corporate HR and Finance functions. Currently, DTCC’s core clearance and settlement services for the U.S. securities markets are not delivered through any public cloud.”

With the company currently embroiled in a class action lawsuit led by a German asset manager that alleges Oracle used improper tactics to falsify the success of its cloud products and “deceived investors as to the true source, nature and quality of Oracle’s all-important cloud revenue stream”, Oracle’s board may be wondering what it would take to make sure Ellison is a little more circumspect on earnings calls. Oracle had not responded to a request for comment as we published.