The CEO of Amazon Web Services explains why it's attacking Oracle's core business so fiercely (ORCL, AMZN)

Andy Jassy

In an interview last week, Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy said that Amazon is upturning the traditional database market.
He mentioned Oracle by name as one of the big players that Amazon is trying to upend — making it very clear that it's out for the kill in the database market.
Jassy describes Amazon's Aurora database as "the fastest growing product in our history," Jassy said.

In a rare interview last week with CNBC, Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy talked about the hot areas he sees for cloud computing. AWS is Amazon's cloud computing division, and the leader in the cloud computing area

Jassy named media companies and the streaming services as one big area where Amazon is scoring a lot of customers. This, even though Amazon competes in video streaming with its own Prime Video. He also named the Internet of Things — the market for smart appliances and gadgetry —as a growth area.

Then, Oracle came up.

"I think if you want a traditional one that's being radically reinvented, it's databases. I think over the last few decades it's been a rough place for enterprises because they've had to contend with the old-guard database providers like Oracle that are expensive, very high lock-in and and also they constantly audit their customers and fine 'em if they find something," he said.

He was referring to the kinds ugly tactics one Oracle customer told us it experienced, several years ago. Some Oracle customers complain that they still go through audits from the company today, reports CIO Magazine. An audit is when a software provider does a check-up specifically to see if its customer is using the software on the number of computers and servers that they paid for, per the terms of their license.

Jassy said that companies had tried to use open source databases like mySQL (also owned by Oracle) and PostgreSQL as alternatives, but argues that they don't perform as well as higher-cost commercial database tools like those pioneered by Oracle.

So Amazon's enterprise customers, "asked us to try and solve that," he said. "So we built something called Amazon Aurora," which he says performs well and is "one-tenth the cost" of commercial alternatives.

And Aurora has been a hit.

"It's the fastest growing product in our history," Jassy said. AWS hasn't released the exact number of users but in first quarter earnings announced last month, Amazon said "tens of thousands of customers" are using it, and the product has grown by about 250% in the past year.

That is still a tiny fraction of Oracle's global users. Still Oracle has not taken this threat sitting down. Oracle throws plenty of shade at AWS, and AWS throws it right back.

More than that, Oracle has been pushing its customers to move to Oracle's own cloud, instead of Amazon's. And its having plenty of success, although, not, perhaps, as much and as fast as analysts want to see. In its last quarter, cloud revenue at Oracle was up 32%, to $1.6 billion.

Here's the full interview.

AWS CEO: We're customer-focused, not competitor-focused from CNBC.

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