Amazon, Microsoft Launch Full-Court Press To Steal Oracle's Database Customers

Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are both taking aim at Oracle’s database business with separate offerings designed to make it easier for customers to ditch Oracle’s software.

AWS Tuesday plans to officially launch its AWS Database Migration Service, which migrates on-premises Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL production databases to the AWS cloud, according to a report from .

AWS Vice President Adam Selipsky told that ’hundreds’ of customers have used a preview version of the AWS Database Migration Service and have used it to move more than 1,000 databases to the AWS cloud.

AWS Database Migration Service, which made its debut last October at the Seattle-based vendor’s Re:Invent conference, takes about 10 to 15 minutes to set up and can migrate a 1-TB on-premises database for about $3, Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS, said at the event. He also said AWS can give organizations "freedom from bad database relationships," an apparent dig at Oracle’s and pressuring them to purchase cloud credits.

AWS had yet to make an official announcement as of Tuesday afternoon Pacific time, and a spokesman didn't respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, which , is running a campaign in which organizations and receive free Microsoft licenses. The offer, which ends June 30, does require customers to sign up for a three-year Microsoft Software Assurance volume licensing subscription.

Representatives from Oracle weren’t immediately available for comment.

Oracle dominates the relational database market and is still widely viewed as having the best-performing product. Yet Oracle’s high costs, and its practice of charging more for new features, have caused some customers to seek less expensive NoSQL and cloud-based database offerings, according to some of the vendor's partners.

Microsoft, in its website describing the campaign to lure Oracle customers, takes aim at the high costs associated with running Oracle's software. ’If your data solution charges you extra for things like security, in-memory performance, high availability, business intelligence, and advanced analytics, it’s time to break free and get the data solution with everything built in,’ Microsoft says in the website.

Robert Steele, managing partner at KiZAN Technologies, a Louisville, Ky.-based Microsoft partner that sells SQL Server, said it makes sense for the software giant to challenge Oracle’s database dominance.

’Microsoft has been targeting Oracle for a long time, and this is another in a series of ways to go after the competition,’ said Steele. ’Oracle is still a strong play and is very embedded in enterprise clients.’