Amazon's lead in cloud computing is officially over. Or so Oracle CTO Larry Ellison would have us believe. Oracle is also entering the bot arena.

Ellison made the claim in his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, saying that Oracle's

new generation of data centers offer better performance at a lower cost than Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

While acknowledging Amazon as 'a pioneer' in selling cloud computing on demand, he said that Oracle will sell its cloud computing services more cheaply than Amazon, and with closer integration of its cloud infrastructure, platform and application layers.

Describing Oracle Cloud's newer data centers, Ellison said:

“Our new second-generation data centres offer twice as many cores as Amazon, twice as much memory as Amazon, four times as much storage as Amazon, and more than 10 times the I/O capacity of Amazon."

Key to this are plans by Oracle to build a global network of data centers that use a highly-redundant cluster design to resist outages. This is of course what rival suppliers including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon also offer, and Ellison gave no details on where or how the new data centers would be built.

In the same keynote, Ellison also said that Oracle plans to offer the same hardware and software Oracle uses in its own cloud for on-premises use under subscription models, to meet the need for companies wanting to use a mix of public and private clouds that act the same whether on-premises or in the public cloud.

While Ellison says Amazon's lead is over, in the last publicly announced sales figures, Oracle's cloud business ran at $171 million, a 7% increase over the previous year and Amazon's equivalent figures were $2.89 billion, a rise of 58%.

Ellison also used his keynote to highlight a new platform for building and running bots by dragging and dropping design elements in a graphical user interface. Ellison demoed a messenger bot built using the Oracle software and running on an iPhone.

This could be another example of Oracle taking on existing competition. The line up of existing contenders with messenger bots and personal digital assistants include Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft but Oracle appears to be targeting the enterprise market and the bot Ellson showcased,  Oracle Mobile Procurement, was used to place an order for a new set of business cards and to make an on-stage joke.

The bot showed Ellison his current card with his previous title of Chief Executive Office and sent the text message:

Checked with the HCM system,” the bot said. “It looks like your title has changed since your last order. Would you like your updated title on your new cards?”

After Ellison hit "yes" the chatbot went through a series of questions to confirm that the quantity of cards required and the shipping address, and if it should adjust the quantity. Having placed the order it asked if there was anything else it could help with.

The answer Ellison gave was:

"No ... unless I can change my salary back to what it used to be"

More Information

Oracle OpenWorld

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