Oracle’s (NYSE:ORCL) cloud infrastructure service is still way behind Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). But that doesn’t keep Larry Ellison, Oracle’s billionaire co-founder, from taking every available opportunity to tout his cloud over the competition.
At the end of Oracle’s quarterly earnings conference call on Thursday, Ellison made a veiled swipe at Amazon Web Services, which suffered a major outage this week, taking down a wide swath of websites and internet services and knocking out critical tools used by Amazon’s own delivery workers.
Ellison didn’t specifically reference the outage, but it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to get his meaning.
"Let me close with a note that I’m going to paraphrase from a very large telecommunications company who uses our cloud and all the other three North American clouds — Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Amazon and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)," Ellison said.
"And the note basically said the one thing we’ve noticed about Oracle, Oracle’s cloud, is that it never ever goes down. We can’t say that about any of the other clouds. We think this is a critical differentiator."
Oracle shares were up 38% this year, trouncing Amazon’s 7% gain. ORCL –grabbed $15.97, or 18%, in the first hour Friday to $104.74.
Over the past decade, Amazon shares are up 1,700%, while Oracle’s market cap has tripled. And in the latest quarter, revenue at AWS surged 39% to $16.1 billion. Oracle’s revenue in the quarter rose 6% to $10.4 billion.
