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Amazon: Just to let you know, Oracle's cloud is so 2011. That's all

Bezos cloud flinger challenges Ellison deal factor

Amazon has pressed the AWS new-service release stream to persuade enterprises against being tempted by tasty deals from cloud weakling Oracle.

Andy Jassy, AWS senior veep, didn’t name names at the AWS enterprise summit in London on Tuesday, but he didn’t have to. It was clear who he was referring to, and boasted AWS had “more services and more features as part of those services".

When making a major platform choice such as cloud, “you don’t want a circa 2011 platform", he said.

Oracle used its recent OpenWorld conference to announce a clutch of new features and updates to its cloud.

For all its puff and spin, however, Oracle’s cloud remains a long, long way behind in even basic features versus AWS, management and partner support.

Amazon has announced 500 "significant" new features and services for AWS up to 6 October. That compared with 516 for the whole of 2014 and 280 the year before.

Gartner distinguished analyst Lydia Leong damned Oracle’s efforts with the faintest of praise speaking at the AWS event. “It’s possible ... Oracle will come up wit a viable offering,” as an alternative to AWS, she speculated.

However, Oracle must get past Microsoft first to take on AWS. “Microsoft is significantly behind [AWS] but is closing the gap,” Leong told The Reg. “Microsoft will trade on being ‘good enough’,” she added.

From Jassy, meanwhile, there was a swipe at “old guard BI tools". Again, there were no names, rather Jassy demonstrated a screen shot of Cognos – owned by IBM – and a price list from Oracle.

Of the latter, he pointed out the price, hundreds of dollars per user, plus licensing and maintenance – that supposedly includes new features. New features are rolled as part of AWS, not charged separately.

He reckoned organsiations had to be careful rolling out the unnamed Oracle, because of the hefty price tag.

Amazon last month announced QuickSite, its BI tool for big data it claimed is one-tenth the cost of “traditional” tools and provides the first data visualisation in 60 seconds.

Jassy took a jab at Oracle’s database business, too. “There isn’t an enterprise who isn’t looking to flee their database provider,” he told a room of enterprise attendees. Again, no names, but it’s Oracle that dominates.

He singled out the expense, lock in, and something Oracle is synonymous with – audits. “They won’t fine you if you buy some of their cloud services,” he said.

The Reg in May revealed Oracle sales staff are being handsomely rewarded to flog their company’s cloud – five to seven times above their normal salary.

Also, we uncovered how Oracle is using the threat of audits to make customers swallow its cloud services. ®

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