Larry Ellison says ‘Amazon’s lead is over’ as Oracle unveils new cloud infrastructure

Just as Larry Ellison said it would, Oracle has unveiled its second generation of cloud infrastructure for third-party developers to run their applications in Oracle data centers. The announcement was made at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco today.

One particular instance, or virtual-machine (VM) type, that Oracle is making available in this second-generation offering — the Dense IO Shape — offers 28.8TB, 512GB, and 36 cores, at a price of $5.40 per hour. This product offers more than 10 times the input-output capacity of Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically the i2.8xlarge instance, said Ellison, Oracle’s former chief executive and current executive chairman and chief technology officer.

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“Amazon’s lead is over. Amazon’s going to have serious competition going forward,” Ellison said. The company will be promoting its refreshed cloud infrastructure through the rest of its current fiscal year, which ends in May 2017, and during the next one, Ellison said.

Currently, AWS leads the cloud infrastructure market, with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM trailing behind. Oracle’s public cloud was not included in the most recent version of Gartner’s highly regarded cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant, which was released last month. “Oracle also does not have enough market share to qualify for inclusion,” the authors of the report wrote.

The Elastic Compute Cloud officially launched at last year’s OpenWorld.

Oracle’s new offering takes advantage of regions, each of which contains three separate “availability domains,” or connected data centers. Oracle’s competitors in the cloud also offer regions of data centers. But this represents a step forward for Oracle, which is building out these new regions worldwide.

Ellison said that he respects Amazon for being the “first mover” in the business of cloud infrastructure. Amazon launched the EC2 service for renting out VM instances by the hour in 2006, and, in the most recent quarter, the entire AWS portfolio fetched Amazon $718 million in operating income and $2.88 billion in revenue.

“But now we’re aggressively moving into infrastructure, and we have a new generation of data centers that we’re building around the world,” Ellison said.

Building data center infrastructure costs money. In the quarter that ended on August 31, Oracle’s cloud infrastructure had operating expenditures of $96 million. Meanwhile, AWS had $2.02 billion in operating expenses in the second quarter.

Also today, Ellison announced a new product called Cloud@Customer, which lets customers place servers that are identical to Oracle’s cloud infrastructure in their own on-premises infrastructure (the servers run the same software as the software on Oracle’s cloud servers). These servers have the same price structure as their corresponding cloud versions, Ellison said.

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A statement on the news is here.