A year ago at Oracle OpenWorld, Larry Ellison said his company would not only compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) but could also beat AWS on price.

With OpenWorld 2016 coming up next week, the chairman and CTO seems ready to make good on that promise. In today's earnings release, Ellison added a prepared statement noting that Oracle’s next generation of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will be announced.

He says it will outdo AWS in pretty much all the fundamentals: "twice the compute, twice the memory, four times the storage, and ten times more I/O at a 20 percent lower price" than AWS, the statement reads. Virtual machines prices vary depending on capabilities, so we'll have to wait for Openworld to find out exactly what Ellison is comparing.

But he did offer this tidbit last year: Oracle would offer dedicated compute resources at half the price of AWS' shared compute. (Shared resources are cheaper, of course.) Oracle hadn't tried starting a price war with AWS before, but Ellison said last year that advancements in computing — which he didn't specify — made it possible for Oracle to leapfrog its competitor.

Even though AWS continues to shrink prices routinely, price competition among the big cloud providers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud — has dwindled. They've been more interested in competing on features.

Moreover, while prices continue to shrink for virtual machines, they're more stable for other cloud elements such as storage and load balancing.

Cloud is heavy on Oracle's mind these days. The company offers its own clouds for supporting various Oracle services, but the IaaS play that Ellison is talking about is more generic, a public cloud meant to compete directly with AWS.

The public cloud is no slam dunk for Oracle. The bulk of the market comes down to the four big providers, with AWS the unquestioned leader and Azure in second.

For its first quarter, which ended Aug. 31, Oracle reported revenues of $8.6 billion and net income of $1.8 billion, or 43 cents per share.

For the same quarter a year ago, Oracle reported revenues of $8.4 billion and net income of $1.7 billion, or 40 cents per share.

Non-GAAP net income of 55 cents per share missed analysts' consensus estimate of 58 cents, according to Thomson Financial.

Oracle did see substantial growth in the cloud. Cloud revenues of all types were $969 million, or 11 percent of revenues. In last year's first quarter, the cloud represented $611 million in revenues, or 7 percent of the total.

Oracle shares were down 3 percent at $39.56 in after-hours trading.