Oracle announced its MySQL HeatWave available for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its latest multicloud interoperability push, while Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison took a dig at his long-time foe for its expensive price tag and hinted some of its large customers will soon move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

“The amount of money these huge companies, these very famous companies spend with Amazon is kind of staggering,” Ellison said during Oracle’s first fiscal quarter of 2023 earnings call. “Oracle is much less expensive than the competition. One, partially because we're faster, which time is money when you're paying by the hour.”

He said the company next quarter will announce some large AWS customers “that will shock you” will jump ship to OCI.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz also touted OCI’s growth rate as being higher than its hyperscale competitors. “As more companies test our cloud they discover how much better it is on price, security, performance, and sustainability,” Catz said. “In addition, we now have cloud regions in more countries and cities than AWS and Azure, giving our customers more choices for their sovereign data.”

The company’s total cloud revenue increased 29% year over year to $3.1 billion for the quarter, which includes its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS), but excludes the contribution from Cerner. Oracle acquired the health care IT firm in June.

Overall, Oracle added around 1,000 new paying infrastructure customers in the first quarter, such as NVIDIA, Mosaic, Tanium, and Santander, Ellison noted. 

Oracle’s multicloud interoperability approach

In July, Oracle expanded its partnership with fellow cloud giant Microsoft to allow customers to use cloud services from both providers. This “high-speed interconnect” between Microsoft Azure and the Oracle Cloud enables customers to directly use the latest Oracle database technology, even if their application is running in Azure.

“Multicloud interoperability is an important step in the evolution of cloud computing. Multicloud interoperability is one of the reasons our infrastructure business is booming,” Ellison said, adding that he expects Oracle’s cloud business to exceed a $20 billion annual run rate next year.

“One of the issues I know a lot of people for years have been concerned about: can Oracle sustain its leading market share in the database business? And I think what is clear is if our databases are available in multiple clouds, I think then the answer is clearly yes,” Ellison said.

That’s why the vendor introduced the MySQL HeatWave on AWS this week. AWS users can now run transaction processing, real-time analytics, and machine learning in one service with MySQL.

“Multiple published customer benchmarks have shown that MySQL HeatWave delivers [seven-times] better performance than Amazon Redshift, [10-times] better performance than Snowflake, and up to [10-times] higher throughput than Amazon's own MySQL database called Aurora,” Ellison touted.

“The multicloud era has begun. Customers are already buying applications and cloud infrastructure from several different providers, including Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Oracle, and others,” Ellison said. “Our job is to give our customers the ability to choose application and infrastructure technology from multiple clouds and then have those different clouds coexist and interoperate gracefully.”