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Oracle chairman guarantees his firm’s latest database warehousing system will beat Amazon in performance and for half the price

Last updated: 16:08 02 Oct 2017 BST, First published: 09:08 02 Oct 2017 BST

larry ellison
Ellis has taken aim at Amazon in the past as well

Larry Ellison, the eccentric chairman of Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) has claimed that even Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) can’t match his firm’s latest database technology.

Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld – the California-based group’s annual conference – Ellison ran through several demonstrations of the new Oracle Database 18c and claimed that customers would pay several times more using Amazon’s technology.

READ: Oracle’s results send shares lower ahead of Friday’s open

“Why would anyone do that?” he said.

Amazon is the undisputed leader in infrastructure as a service business with a whopping 44.2% share in 2016, according to research by Gartner. Its nearest competitor is Microsoft Inc (NASDAQ:MSFT), but even that only has a 7.1% share.

Oracle barely registers on the list, with a market share of 0.3%, although that is triple the 0.1% it held in 2015.

Ellison told developers, partners and customers at the conference that the new system is fully automated and has 99.995% reliability. That translates to just 30 minutes of downtime each year.

New technology available in December

“This is the most important thing we have done in a long, long time,” Ellison said.

“If you eliminate human labor, you eliminate human error,” he said. “By the way, it’s always embarrassing for me to admit this, but my autopilot flies my plane a lot better than I do.”

By contrast, Amazon’s Redshift warehousing service only claims reliability of 99%, while Ellison repeated his point about cost.

“We guarantee our bill, our bill will be less than half of what Amazon would charge you,” Ellison said.

“You take a Redshift Amazon database workload that’s already running at Amazon and you move it to the Oracle autonomous database and we will guarantee in writing, contractually, before looking at the workload, that any of those Redshift workloads will move to Oracle and your bill will be one half or less than what Amazon charges you,” Ellison told the crowd. “We will write that in your contract.”

The new 18c will be available for data warehousing in December.

But Oracle and Ellison aren’t done with automation there. The chairman said he would introduce an autonomous cybersecurity system tomorrow (Tuesday), the last day of the conference.

Oracle shares added 0.5% to US$58.60 in pre-market trade.

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