Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy fired back at Oracle's Larry Ellison on Thursday, just a month after Oracle's CTO spent his whole keynote speech trashing Amazon's cloud service.
"I don’t think anybody who knows a fair bit about the cloud took much stock in [Ellison's] comments," Jassy said in an interview with Business Insider, after Amazon announced its big partnership with VMWare.
Jassy called Ellison's speech a classic "old guard technology tactic," in which a latecomer with less functionalities and a fewer number of customers tries to establish itself by "manipulating" benchmarks.
"As far as I can tell, that was made up," Jassy added, referring to the stats Ellison gave during his keynote last month.
In his speech, Ellison said AWS is 24 times slower than Oracle Cloud and 20 years behind in technology, while pointing out it's a closed system that could end up locking you in to using them forever.
Instead, Jassy pointed to what analysts are saying about AWS. For example, Gartner said in its Magic Quadrant report last year that AWS is 10-times bigger than its next 14 competitors combined, while putting it at the top of the list against this year.
Deutsche Bank also wrote in a recent note, "Oracle talked up its 'next-gen' infrastructure as a cheaper rival to AWS, but we don’t believe it will be competitive anytime soon."
Jassy narrowed down AWS's success to the following 3 factors, a point Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky made during its most recent earnings call as well:
- Functionality and pace of innovation: AWS added 422 new services and features in the first half of this year versus 722 in all of last year. It also continues to keep up with important trends by adding data analytics and machine-learning functionalities.
- Partner and customer ecosystem: AWS struck a big partnership deal with Salesforce last quarter, while adding a bunch of customers running SAP on AWS, like GE Oil & Gas, Kellogg's, and Brooks Brothers. It's also expanded to Mumbai last quarter, making it available in 13 infrastructure regions globally.
- Experience: AWS started offering public cloud-computing services nearly 10 years ago, way before any of its competitors did. That's given it a huge head start, as AWS's revenue is estimated to be as much as over four times Microsoft Azure's, the second-largest provider.
