It’s probably a safe bet that when Oracle Corp. Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t converse with Alexa.

The company’s founder spent more than an hour Tuesday during a presentation at the company’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, alternately trumpeting the merits of Oracle’s Autonomous Database Cloud and pointing out what he believes are the failings of Alexa creator Amazon.com Inc. and its cloud unit, Amazon Web Services Inc.

“The Oracle Autonomous Database is probably the most important thing we have ever done and it’s very different from what other people are doing in the data management industry,” said Ellison (pictured). “This is how we plan to compete with Amazon.”

The primary purpose of Oracle’s event was to announce the first general availability of the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud as part of the firm’s Autonomous Database. The platform was billed as the world’s first self-securing, self-repairing and self-managing database cloud service. It is built on Oracle Database 18c, the first release of new annual database software available on Oracle Cloud Services.

“It’s the first of several autonomous platform-as-a-service databases we will be delivering this year,” Ellison said.

As Ellison began a discussion of the various PaaS features, it became clear that his major interest was in drawing a distinct comparison with Amazon Web Services — as it has been for a couple of years now. One shot was gratuitous: When Ellison stepped onto the company’s conference center stage, he found that the wrong slides had been loaded into his prompter, quipping, “These slides are not coming from our cloud by the way. They’re coming from AWS.”

Ellison got a little more on point while talking about features. He promoted Oracle’s ability to scale up compute and storage independently, and repeated a contention he has made for the better part of a year: “When we do in one minute what it takes Amazon five minutes to do, then Amazon is five times more expensive,” Ellison declared. “You move that workload to Oracle and we guarantee that your cloud bill… will be less than half of what Amazon is charging you.”

He also said Oracle’s Autonomous Database Cloud will provide automated protection from planned and unplanned downtime. And it includes security features which automatically apply security updates while running and encrypts all data. “We need automated systems, intelligent systems to protect our data,” Ellison said. “Once an intrusion has been detected, the system can automatically patch itself with no human intervention.”

Market share gap

Behind Ellison’s pointed critique of his chief competitor lies the reality of the corporate scoreboard. Gartner’s analysis of public cloud market share continues to show Oracle lagging far behind AWS and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure. The company’s PaaS announcement, with its significant reliance on automated solutions, is clearly designed to offer a differentiated option. “This is a whole new layer for the cloud,” Ellison said. “Our strategy is to deliver a higher level of PaaS services.”

There’s more to come. Over the remainder of 2018, Oracle plans to deliver additional self-managing services, including Autonomous Analytics, Autonomous Mobility, Autonomous Application Development and Autonomous Integration.

Ellison also touched on a wide range of peripheral subjects including the strength of facial recognition technology in China, prospects for a complete fleet of autonomous Uber cars, neural networks with machine learning, and the recent acquisition of application integration provider MuleSoft by Salesforce.com Inc. Chief Executive Marc Benioff. “It’s kind of a conventional, old-fashioned way of plugging things together,” mused Ellison, before launching into another criticism of Amazon. In this case, Benioff got off easy.

Photo: Oracle