Andy Jassy
AWS CEO Andy Jassy

A month after Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison spent the better part of an hour trash-talking Amazon Web Services, AWS chief Andy Jassy responded yesterday, dismissing Ellison’s remarks out of hand.

“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.

Larry Ellison (Photo: Oracle)
Larry Ellison (Photo: Oracle)

Jassy called Ellison’s speech — in which the Oracle co-founder declared that Amazon’s lead in the cloud was “over” — a classic “old-guard technology tactic,” in which a latecomer with less functionality and fewer 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.

During his keynote session at Oracle’s Open World conference in San Francisco on October 20, Ellison claimed that “Oracle running on its own cloud is more than 100 times faster than Redshift on AWS for basic analytic queries.”

He asked rhetorically, “AWS more than 100 times slower? That’s not possible. That’s ridiculous. But I’m being nothing but fair. You can count on that. If someone says this isn’t true, if you want to refute them, take it one at a time and refute them. All true. Quite amazing.”

Ellison said AWS’s services are not only slower than Oracle’s but are outdated and closed, presenting the danger of lock-in.

Yesterday, Jassy put forward three reasons for the raging success enjoyed by the public-cloud market leader:

  • It maintains a constant pace of innovation, adding 422 services and features in the first half of this year alone, vs. 722 in all of 2015.
  • It has numerous strong partnerships, including one with Salesforce and, most recently, with VMware, as well as customers running Oracle rival SAP on AWS, including Brooks Brothers, GE Oil & Gas, and Kellogg’s.
  • It is 10 years old, having started offering cloud services well before any competitors, and so has a huge head-start.
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