Amazon Web Services (AWS), the e-commerce giant’s cloud business is forecasted to exceed cloud software conglomerate, Oracle as the second-largest enterprise software provider in the next 12 to 15 months.
In an interview with CNBC, MKM Partners analyst, Rohit Kulkarni has predicted a boom for Amazon Web Services to the tune of billions of dollars. “AWS is growing to $45 billion, maybe $50 billion in revenue next year. Oracle is doing $41 billion,” Kulkarni said. In a poll by FactSet, analysts predicted to see $45.76 billion in AWS revenue in the 2020 fiscal year. Conversely, Refinitiv’s consensus for Oracle’s 2021 fiscal year is at $41.12 billion.
This comes as Amazon announced it has shut down its final Oracle database for its consumer business, including Amazon Prime, Alexa, and Kindle. Now using its home-grown Amazon Web Services databases instead to power these businesses, they’ve revealed a reduction of costs by 60% and latency by 40%.
"Over my 17 years at Amazon, I have seen that my colleagues on the engineering team are never content to leave good enough alone," Jeff Barr AWS chief evangelist wrote in a blog post. "Over the years we realized that we were spending too much time managing and scaling thousands of legacy Oracle databases."
Just last year, Oracle’s co-founder and chairman, Larry Ellison said it will be difficult for Amazon to rely exclusively on its own database technologies. “They’ve got a goal to get off by 2020,” he said at a company event. “SAP couldn’t do it. Salesforce couldn’t do it. I don’t think they can do it. Anyway, we’ll find out.”
Since the arrival of AWS in 2006, it has helped Amazon become better known as a technology company. And it's becoming increasingly more profitable than the e-commerce business.
But Ellison had some fighting words for Amazon. “They think of themselves as a competitor, so it’s kind of embarrassing when Amazon uses Oracle, but they want you to use Aurora and Redshift,” he said. “they’ve had 10 years to get off Oracle, and they’re still on Oracle. And it’s not going to be easy for them to use their own technology. It’s not going to be cost-effective. I mean, it’s really, really hard.”
