Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison said during his keynote speech at the annual Oracle OpenWorld customer, partner and developer conference in San Francisco on Sunday evening that Amazon's lead [in the cloud market] is over.
Ellison was of course referring to Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant's popular cloud computing solution that launched a decade ago.
The executive unveiled what Oracle is calling its second generation of cloud products and services. One product on display, an Oracle Dense Cloud IO bare metal cloud sever, offers up 36 CPU cores, 512GB of RAM and 28.8TB of solid state storage for just $5.80 per hour.
Picking a fight with Amazon is admirable but Oracle certainly has a lot of ground to cover. As Fortune points out, Gartner recently said Amazon's S3 cloud storage service hosts more than twice as much customer data as its next seven largest competitors combined. Morgan Stanley earlier this year estimated that Amazon Web Services brought in $7.9 billion last year - close to eight times as much as second-place Azure, Microsoft's infrastructure-as-a-service offering.
Given the massive scope of the undertaking, Oracle's new services won't arrive all at once. Computerworld notes that Oracle's western US cloud region based in Phoenix will be available beginning October 13 followed by an eastern region center that'll go online by the end of the year. An expansion into England and Germany should be complete by June 2017.
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