This year’s Oracle OpenWorld 2016 began with fighting words form CEO Larry Ellison, who boldly claimed that the company is in fact the best in cloud despite stiff competition. The argument had some strong points and some not-so-strong ones. Did Ellison offer any hard numbers to back up his assertion? Some, but not enough, one might answer.

“I’m looking for proof points from Oracle, and I haven’t seen it as much this year as I had hoped,” said John Furrier (@furrier), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during OpenWorld. “The messaging just sounds so hollow at the top. Like, it’s the same: ‘We’re the cloud. We’re up by 77 percent.’ Seventy-seven percent of the numbers are not that big. They’re using percentages, not real numbers,” he contended.

Furrier argued that cloud is so pressing for businesses right now that they are no longer turned on by fluff — they want the straight dope. “I think the world’s kind of getting it, like, ‘Hey, stop head-faking us.'”

Oracle’s strong suit(e)

This isn’t to say that Oracle isn’t a formidable power in tech or that it doesn’t know what it is doing. Indeed, Furrier said the idea that Oracle is late to the cloud game is baseless.

Cohost Peter Burris said, “Oracle does not want to be a source. They don’t want to be: ‘Take data out of our system and move it somewhere else.’ They also want to be a sync.” He said Oracle is delivering multi-pronged, engineered cloud in order to win customers over for the long-haul.

Full-out war of the ‘four biggies’

“It’s a full-out war, in my opinion, with the four biggies — Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle — in terms of pure ‘we’re going all in with cloud,'” Furrier said. “The high ground in this business — in the computer industry — for the next 20 to 30 years is the cloud. He added that Amazon is clearly ahead now, Oracle and Microsoft are in the middle, and Google …?

Burris chimed in: “Google has to decide: Are they going to be an enterprise player? Because that’s more than just making Gmail, Docs and other things available.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Oracle OpenWorld.

Photo by SiliconANGLE