The speed of Oracle’s networks is what has helped the database and cloud products vendor win new customers and carve out a niche around work involving artificial intelligence and machine learning, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison told listeners on the company’s quarter earnings call this week.

Although Ellison didn’t mention names, it’s likely that he was referring to No. 1 cloud vendor Amazon Web Services (AWS). Part of Oracle’s secret sauce is the RDMA (remote direct memory access) network used to connect Oracle’s computers, Ellison said on the phone call.

“The most interesting thing is we have a much faster network than anybody else,” Ellison said. “We have a fundamentally different network than any of the other cloud providers. … We just run much, much faster, much more reliably than they do. And it‘s a fundamental advantage that they can’t compete with unless they rebuild their cloud from scratch.”

[RELATED: ‘Exploding’ AI, ML Demand Helps Oracle Surpass $12 Billion In Q2 Revenue]

Larry Ellison Comments On Oracle Q2 Earnings

CRN has reached out to Oracle and AWS for comment.

Ellison also discussed his vision for two areas where he wants Oracle to dominate in the future – national health care systems and business-to-business (B2B) commerce automation that feels like ordering items from Amazon.com or Walmart.com.

“We have very strong partners in finance, insurance and logistics,” Ellison said. “So we can completely automate the entire transaction, where B2B transactions begin to look like B2C transactions. They’re fully end-to-end automated, and that’s a huge new business for us and our partners.”

Two investment firms authored positive reports on Oracle’s performance despite some slight deceleration in growth.

Oracle’s cloud business dropped to 27 percent growth year over year from 29 percent reported the prior quarter, according to a Tuesday report from KeyBanc. Strategic back office software-as-a-service slowed to 26 percent growth from 33 percent the prior quarter.

And the firm voiced “some concern” about Oracle’s lower gross margin, free cash flow and growing capital spending – Oracle could end the year with $9.2 billion in spending to meet Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) demand.

Still, KeyBanc is “increasingly confident in the top-line outlook,” given the acceleration in remaining performance obligation (RPO) growth year over year – 28 percent this most recent quarter compared to 22 percent the prior quarter – and the company beating Wall Street expectations with its $12.3 billion in total for the quarter, which ended Nov. 30.

In its report Tuesday, Credit Suisse said that the 28 percent RPO growth “underscores customers’ increasing commitments to Oracle Cloud” and predicted that Oracle could reach third or fourth in the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market and No. 2 in software-as-a-service (SaaS).

“Whereas the focus of change following the Global Financial Crisis was at the applications layer with the adoption of SaaS, the focus of change is now on the infrastructure and platform layers of the stack,” according to the Credit Suisse report. “We believe (1) 2023 will be defined by businesses moving forward on multi-year, strategic cloud-first transformation roadmaps and (2) expect Oracle to be a key beneficiary of this accelerating trend given its database leadership and ‘down-the-stack’ strategy.”

Despite these cheery reports, Oracle’s stock remained mostly flat. After a 5 percent boost to Oracle’s stock price after the market closed Monday, the stock fell to $80.48 a share Tuesday after the market closed – in all, down about 1 percent from where the share price stood before the earnings call.

Here’s what else Ellison had to say this week.