Oracle Corp. went on the offensive again versus Amazon.com Inc. today with a new cloud pricing plan that gives discounts to Oracle database customers who move their databases to the cloud.

Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison (pictured) said during an event at its Redwood City, California headquarters that while Oracle has matched Amazon Web Services Inc. for base-level computing, storage and networking services known as infrastructure as a service, it’s now moving to make higher-level cloud services such as databases and analytics cheaper than AWS’s.

Actually, Ellison claimed that Oracle’s infrastructure runs faster and therefore ends up costing less, but it’s clear that the company is focusing more on its traditional strengths one tier up from the infrastructure: so-called platform as a service offerings such as the Oracle Database. So today, Oracle said it will allow customers to move their existing licenses for databases, middleware and analytics to Oracle’s platform services, just as they’ve allowed them to bring licenses to its infrastructure before.

“That’s where we think the real differentiation is,” Steve Daheb, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud, said in response to a question on whether Oracle was essentially acknowledging that AWS was the runaway leader in cloud infrastructure. Platform services are more difficult and offer more potential for Oracle to lead the way, added Juan Loaiza, Oracle’s senior vice president of systems technology.

Cloud computing provides companies computing, storage, networking and applications over the Internet, rather than through running them on their own expensive hardware and software, lowering the cost and making it faster to tap computing power for new tasks.

Ellison also hinted at an upcoming new version of Oracle’s database that would be much more automated, handling tasks such as updates and software patches automatically to reduce the high cost of human labor. Taken together, the automation and new pricing will mean that it should cost 50 percent less to run on Oracle’s cloud than AWS’s, Ellison claimed.

“The way we want to compete is to deliver a high degree of automation to our customers,” Ellison told press, customers and Oracle employees at the event. And the biggest payback, he said, will be in eliminating human error. “If you don’t patch the database at Equifax, that could be expensive,” he said pointedly.

In addition, Oracle said customers now will be able to pay a fixed amount of money per year or per month and apply those credits to any of its cloud services, getting discounts depending on the level of commitment. These “Universal Credits” can be used on infrastructure or platform services or new services that come out later.

“Nobody else has this,” Ellison said. “Amazon is closer but they’re not very close. Other cloud suppliers will move to this contracting vehicle and consumption model, but they’re not there yet.”

Despite the professed confidence of Oracle executives, the company faces an ongoing challenge from cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. That’s one reason the company has been focusing on other layers of the cloud computing “stack,” such as platform as a service and software-as-a-service, or online business applications, such as Salesforce.com Inc. and Workday Inc. provide.

Overall, the company is looking to play to its continuing strength inside data centers by pitching itself as the best choice for the majority of companies that need to do computing not just in the cloud but in their own data centers as well because of the cost of moving data or applications or regulatory limitations on where data resides.

To that end, Oracle has positioned itself as the key provider of soup-to-nuts technology to manage that so-called hybrid cloud setup. It offers hardware appliances to mirror cloud services inside data centers as well as software and cloud services, promising the services will work the same on-premises or off.

The announcement today comes ahead of Oracle’s big annual user conference, Open World, in San Francisco starting Oct. 1. Ellison already flagged broad plans for the show during Oracle’s earnings conference call last week, when he said the company would introduce the next generation of Oracle’s database. “It will will become world’s first fully autonomous database,” he said. “A ‘self-driving database’ eliminates the labor cost of tuning, managing and upgrading.”

Not least, Oracle has been revamping a sales force traditionally accustomed to selling big multiyear, multimillion-dollar software licensing contracts. Now, more new sales people are being trained to go after the smaller businesses that never bought on-premises gear or software, some of which have grown into new giants such as Uber Technologies Inc. and Airbnb Inc.

Photo: Robert Hof