Updated March 14 22:45 BST: DTCC says Ellison’s claims were inaccurate and misleading.
Much has been made of the “cloud wars” between hyperscalers AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, as they compete for customers. If you really want regularly vituperative clashes between cloud vendors, AWS versus Oracle should be your default port of call, however.
On that count, Oracle’s fiscal Q3 earnings call ticked the boxes, with Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison gleefully recounting a high profile win Oracle has — arguably unusually — stolen from market leader AWS, as it ramps up its cloud offering.
See also: Amazon Kisses Goodbye to Last of its 7,500 Oracle Databases
Among them, a shift by Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation — the world’s largest financial services corporation dealing in post-trade transactions — from AWS to Oracle.
“DTCC is migrating their multi-terabyte Amazon AWS Redshift system out of Amazon and into our public cloud using the Oracle Autonomous Database” Ellison bragged. “They’re also moving their analytics from Amazon to the Oracle Analytics suite.”
He later attributed such moves to competitive cost and flexibility, saying Oracle’s “Autonomous Database” is both serverless and elastic.
DTCC provides clearing services including the confirmation, settlement, and delivery of financial transactions, via multilateral netting in which multiple parties arrange for transactions to be summed, rather than settled individually.
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In 2018, DTCC’s subsidiaries processed securities transactions valued at more than U.S. $1.85 quadrillion. (A quadrilllion is a thousand trillion).
UPDATED: DTCC said the claims were inaccurate: “DTCC uses AWS to support a variety of business functions, and DTCC does not have any plans to move applications from AWS to Oracle.”
Read this: What Larry Ellison told Investors this Week was Completely Inaccurate
Ellison had more AWS-bashing to do, however.
“When your application isn’t running on the Oracle public cloud, you don’t pay for any CPUs. You got no CPUs dedicated to you. When your application isn’t running, you’re not paying for servers. That is not true of Amazon’s databases”, he said.
(He was, again, wrong, but only as March 11…)
“If you have Redshift, you pay for the Redshift processors. If you have their MySQL implementation, you pay for those processors… [customers are] shocked to find that we are much, much less expensive than AWS even though we’re more secure and we’re faster,” he claimed.
See also: As AWS Slashes Disaster Recovery Costs by 80%, Can Independent Firms Compete?
Japanese financial services firm Nomura has also made $20 million commitment, the company said; moving its production systems handling mission-critical transactions to Oracle Cloud. (It did not define “mission-critical” on this occasion).
“These are the applications that service a number of large-scale financial institutions. It’s a very big commitment from Nomura”, Ellison noted.
(Customary earnings call bragging, the Nomura move is indeed a big one. Those with long memories will be pleased to see the Japanese investment house putting its money where its mouth is: 24 months ago its analysts were hyping Oracle stock, saying “in our view [investors are] overly concerned about cloud trends and competition from new database technologies and is not sufficiently focused on a more stable legacy core.)
Oracle reported total revenues for the quarter of $9.8 billion, up two percent year-on-year. Cloud Services & License Support Revenues were $6.9 billion, up four percent. The standout was its Fusion ERP cloud revenues, up 37 percent year-over-year.
See also: Oracle Sued for Allegedly “Systematically Coercing and Bribing” Customers
