Oracle’s founder and Executive Chairman, Larry Ellison, said that his company is to expand its cloud computing services, which will undoubtedly bring Oracle into direct competition with Amazon.
Oracle to compete with Amazon on price
“We’re prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price”, Ellison said in a webcast on Monday, after he announced that Oracle would offer online storage so that customers can run applications entirely in Oracle’s cloud.
This expansion is an important development for Oracle, which is moving its traditional database and customer relationship management businesses into the cloud. “This is a really big deal” said Ellison, who stepped down last year as chief executive.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently the market leader in terms of providing cloud capabilities to customers, followed by Microsoft’s Azure service, and then IBM.
Oracle’s cloud services are jointly called the Oracle Cloud Platform, and will provide a cost-effective alternative to Amazon, according to Ellison.
“Our new archive storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it’s one-tenth their price”, he said. The company’s cloud business is rapidly growing, now worth around $2.3 billion a year based on figures from the last quarter.
But Amazon and Microsoft each earn about $6.3 billion in cloud-based revenue each year.
SOURCE: Reuters.
Larry Banks is a keen follower of technology and finance. He has worked for a variety of online publications, writing about a diverse range of topics including mobile networks, patents, and Internet video delivery technologies.
