Oracle CEO: 'It's kind of embarrassing when Amazon uses Oracle'

Oracle's co-founder and chairman, Larry Ellison has hit back at reports that Amazon is planning to stop using its services by claiming it would struggle without them.

Speaking at a company event in Redwood Shores, California, Ellison said it will be difficult for Amazon to rely exclusively on its own database technologies.

"They think of themselves as a competitor, so it's kind of embarrassing when Amazon uses Oracle," he said. "They've had 10 years to get off Oracle and they're still on Oracle. It's not going to be easy to use their own tech. It's not going to be cost-effective."

Ellison referred to a CNBC report from last week that suggested Amazon is looking to stop using Oracle's technology by 2020. He also gave examples of other high profile companies that have tried and failed to drop Oracle services.

"They've got a goal to get off by 2020," he said. "Salesforce couldn't do it. SAP couldn't do it. I don't think they can do it. We'll see."

Ellison's comments are latest in an ongoing spat between the two tech giants, who both provide cloud infrastructure and database systems. The Oracle boss said its software is stronger than Amazon's offerings, which include the Aurora database and Redshift data warehouse. He said no database is as easy to use as Oracle's.

Last week an Oracle spokesperson said that Amazon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its Oracle technology to run its business and that Amazon had spent another $60 million on database and data analytics software from Oracle.

Some may be surprised to learn that Amazon isn't solely reliant on its own AWS for its infrastructure needs, there are some parts of Amazon's e-commerce systems, which were set up prior to the launch of AWS, that still heavily use Oracle databases.