The battle for domination of the cloud entered a new phase this week as database software giant Oracle took direct aim at cloud computing leaders Amazon Web Services. At the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Oracle founder Larry Ellison used two keynote addresses to reiterate his view that his company's cloud products were faster, cheaper and more secure than the Amazon equivalents. This is despite the fact that Oracle's total revenue from cloud services for the 2017 fiscal year, at $4.6-billion (R63-billion), was less than a third of Amazon Web Services' $14.5-billion for the same period. It also made a relatively small contribution to Oracle's total income of $30.4-billion. For this reason, many commentators dismissed Ellison's gibes. Almost unnoticed in these numbers, however, was the stratospheric growth of Oracle's cloud business, up 60% from the year before. This momentum emboldened Oracle to the extent that screens throughout the conference venue warned del...
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