Oracle's Ellison Takes Aim At Fresh Targets: AWS, Workday

The technology inside Oracle's expanding global network of data centers will soon challenge Amazon Web Services' lead in the public infrastructure cloud market, said Larry Ellison in delivering the partner keynote Sunday to start the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Oracle's founder and CTO said housed inside the 19 data centers the company has brought online to host its multilayer cloud services are next-generation computing nodes that can beat the reigning hyper-scale kingpin in cost, performance and reliability.

In delivering a speech that a few years back would have reliably targeted IBM and SAP, Ellison aimed at "a new set of competitors": AWS for infrastructure and Workday for applications.

[Related: Oracle Confirms 12.2 Database Release Will Be Cloud-Only At First, Analyst Predicts Move Will 'Frustrate' Customers]

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While Oracle's recent splash into the IaaS race has put AWS in its crosshairs, the Redwood City, Calif.-based company sees Workday most often as a challenger to its more-established portfolio of Software-as-a-Service products, according to Ellison.

"We're in the middle of a generational change as computing moves from on-premises from lots of data centers and lots of companies all over the world to a smaller number of super data centers called clouds," Ellison told attendees.

Oracle's focus has been at playing at all layers of the stack, and delivering complete and integrated suites of applications, he said.

Amazon's market share is clearly the greatest prize in Ellison's eyes.

"This coming year, you'll see us aggressively moving into Infrastructure-as-a-Service," Ellison said. "The technology that Amazon pioneered is the third leg of the stool where we've made incredible progress over the last couple of years."

He said Oracle needs to offer lower prices and higher performance than its "No. 1 infrastructure competitor."

And it can achieve that goal thanks to servers in its 19 data centers that have more cores, memory and storage than those from Amazon. Those data centers are clustered in regional groups of three highly interconnected facilities.

On the software side, Oracle's domain expertise in ERP gives the company "a huge advantage over Workday," he said.

The business-management software rival only has hundreds of ERP customers, compared to Oracle's almost 3,000, Ellison said.

"We're pulling away," Ellison said in comparison to Workday. "We're growing twice as fast as they are."

In his keynote, Ellison also introduced a new offering that melds the business model of public and private cloud. Oracle will start selling on-premises hardware — an "extension of cloud behind the customer firewall" — as a subscription service.

"Those cloud machines are more compatible with our cloud than simply running our software on-premises," he said.

The option is branded Oracle Cloud@Customer. It involves standing up in customer facilities systems that are identical to those running in Oracle's public cloud, making it more effortless to move workloads back and forth.

That offering also comes in in Exadata and big data flavors — two specialized Oracle converged products.

While acknowledging his respect for what Amazon has accomplished, Ellison said Oracle's ability to seamlessly connect public and private environments is the reason AWS' "lead is over."

"Amazon's going to have serious competition going forward" with Oracle aggressively moving into its market, he said.

Another differentiator for Oracle is security, Ellison told attendees.

He reminded the audience that "our next presidential election might be decided by Vladimir Putin."

At that point Ellison asked, "You think security is important?"