Oracle Corp. may be about to lose two of its biggest customers.

Salesforce.com Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., which rely on the provider’s flagship relational database to support their operations, are “actively working” to find alternatives, according to a report today in The Information.

The news is not too surprising given that Oracle competes with both companies in various pieces of cloud computing. The database maker is heavily prioritizing its infrastructure- and software-as-a-service offerings in a bid to offset declining on-premises license sales. In particular, Oracle Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison (pictured) and Amazon Web Services Inc. Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy have been publicly tossing barbs at each other for well over a year, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has long sparred with Ellison as well.

Still, the news spooked investors. Oracle’s shares fell about 1.5 percent today, a day on which most tech firms saw their shares rising in a mild New Year’s rally.

According to the sources who leaked the news to The Information, Salesforce and Amazon have already made significant progress toward removing their dependence on Oracle. Each company is taking a different approach to the task.

Amazon is reportedly working to move from Oracle’s database to open-source NoSQL software. This means that the company may only be pursuing a partial replacement, since NoSQL stores are generally not designed to replace a relational system completely, if at all.

But there could still be a lot at stake. In December, Ellison said Amazon had spent $50 million on his company’s software during the fourth quarter alone.

Salesforce, meanwhile, is supposedly pursuing a much bolder migration plan. The tipsters said that the company is developing its own alternative to Oracle’s database. A homegrown relational store could potentially enable Salesforce to do much more than merely reduce its reliance on a competitor. If the development project ends up being successful, the company might try to take on Oracle directly in the database market. Salesforce’s Heroku division already has a presence there.

The Information report also noted that the increasingly pitched competition between Oracle and the other two companies is apparent in product names. AWS reportedly named its RedShift database as a not-so-veiled reference to Oracle’s red branding. For its part, Salesforce has named its move onto a new database “Sayonara.”

In any case, Salesforce and Amazon’s efforts could have consequences for the entire Oracle customer base. The other Fortune 500 companies that rely on the provider’s database might start looking at alternatives more seriously in wake of the news. However, most enterprises might have a less urgent incentive to switch because they’re not actively competing with Oracle.

And even Amazon and Salesforce could take years to make their own transition, because it’s still difficult to move core business “system of record” databases to the cloud. “Salesforce today runs on Oracle, and changing that underlying database would be the largest change in the history of Salesforce, so it’s not to be undertaken lightly,” said Stu Miniman, a senior analyst with SiliconANGLE sister company Wikibon.

And that’s true for many other companies too, said Wikibon Chief Technology Officer David Floyer. “The systems of record are extremely difficult to move, and very risky from a business perspective,” he said. “Oracle DB may have to lower their prices over time, and become ‘nicer’ to do business with, but Oracle’s database software for systems of record is still best of breed and, for most of their customers, worth the money.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: SiliconANGLE