Amazon.com Inc. and Oracle Corp. have famously been at each other’s throats for years, arguing over whose products and services are more superior and offer better value. Even so, Amazon has also been a major customer of Oracle’s for many years, using its database software to power the information technology infrastructure for both its retail and cloud businesses.

Now, though, it seems that Amazon is longing to ditch Oracle completely, with plans to move its information technology infrastructure off its databases proceeding rapidly, according to a report Wednesday by CNBC.

The report, citing unnamed sources familiar with the plans, said Amazon, which offers its own cloud databases that compete with Oracle’s, will complete the move by the first quarter of 2020.

The move comes at a time when Amazon’s cloud business Amazon Web Services Inc. is enjoying substantial growth at a rate of 49 percent in its latest quarter. Meanwhile, Oracle’s business is still around the same size as it was four years ago, and therefore coming under increased pressure.

Amazon is also the king of the public cloud scene, commanding a 52 percent share of the worldwide infrastructure-as-a-service market, according to a report posted by Gartner Inc. this week. In contrast, Oracle’s cloud business didn’t even merit a mention in that report.

Amazon’s cloud business is also set to grow even more, with CNBC separately reporting it has a $16 billion in “backlog revenue” as a result of locking customers into “bigger and longer” contracts. Backlog revenue is a nonbalance-sheet item that represents the total value of future contract obligations. Amazon refers to this as “commitments in customer contracts for future services that have not yet been recognized.” The remaining balance gets recognized as revenue once the service is billed and delivered.

Rumors that Amazon, and also Salesforce.com Inc., are searching for an alternative to Oracle first became public in January. But in its report CNBC said Amazon did in fact first begin moving away from Oracle’s database around four to five years ago. Much of its core shopping business remains on Oracle’s databases, however, and Amazon is looking to migrate away from them within the next 14 to 20 months. According to CNBC’s sources, Amazon believes that Oracle’s technology cannot scale enough to meet its performance needs.

But Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc., scoffed at these claims, saying that when it comes to scalability for large workloads, Oracle remains the “gold standard” for most transactional applications.

He also pointed out that Amazon doesn’t really have many alternatives to Oracle. “Without saying which database it plans to use to replace Oracle, it’s tough to see which database technology could scale to a similar range like the Oracle database, as currently Amazon does not have any option to that scale in its in-house database portfolio,” he said.

Those sentiments were echoed by Wikibon analyst David Floyer when the first reports of Amazon’s plans emerged earlier this year. Back then, he noted that “systems of record are extremely difficult to move, and very risky from a business perspective.”

Mueller also said that Amazon’s customers are unlikely to be impressed by the bellicose statements. “Both companies partner well for what matters – making the customer successful,” he said.

Whether or not Amazon does shift away from Oracle remains to be seen, but in any case it seems their rivalry will continue unabated. Oracle is getting into the cloud in a big way with new services such as the Autonomous Database Cloud, which was launched last year to compete with Amazon’s Redshift database. Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison made some big claims about that product, saying it can run at half the cost of Amazon’s alternative, with guaranteed 99.995 percent uptime.

Amazon and Oracle have also been squabbling over government cloud contracts, particularly regarding one lucrative Department of Defense contract that AWS is reportedly set to land. Oracle is lobbying the government against that deal and has teamed up with big tech firms, including Microsoft Corp., Dell Technologies Inc., IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co., to argue that Amazon is getting preferential treatment.

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