Late last year, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison set off a war of words with Amazon Web Services — the retailer's insanely profitable $14 billion cloud computing platform — after spending an entire keynote session talking trash.
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Amazon's CTO takes a shot at Oracle and the 'nightmare' of other legacy databases (AMZN, ORCL, MSFT)
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels thinks companies like Oracle present customers with a "nightmare."
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels hypes Amazon Web Services' success with startups at the AWS Summit 2017 in San Francisco.
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Almost six months later, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels seems unfazed.
At today's Amazon Web Services Summit, Vogels announced that customers have used its Amazon Database Migration Service (DMS) to move 23,000 databases from "old world" IT companies like Oracle or Microsoft. That's up from 20,000 in March.
While he didn't name names, he chided those legacy companies for what he called "punitive" licensing practices. Those companies make customers predict years in advance for the database capacity they'll need under a long-term sales contract, and may sometimes subject them to intense audits to verify they're not using more than they've paid for.
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By Vogels' reckoning, this "nightmare" practice means companies tend to buy as many as 30% more licenses than they actually wind up needing, as a hedge against the dreaded licensing audit, "because it's very hard to predict the future."
"They're actually retreating," Vogels says. "They're contracting their growth instead of expanding it like Amazon is doing."
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