Amazon promises 'freedom' to frustrated Oracle customers

Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy has a message for Oracle customers: we're offering you an easy way to leave Oracle.

Jassy says he's giving such customers "freedom from bad database relationships."

"It's extremely rare when I meet with an enterprise customer that isn't looking to flee their database provider. They don't feel they are treated in the right way," he during his keynote speech on Wednesday at Amazon's AWS re:Invent conference being held this week in Las Vegas.

He was introducing a new service called AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) that helps companies move their data out of an Oracle database and into any number of Amazon's Oracle competitors like its homegrown database called Aurora.

DMS also lets a company keep its Oracle database, but move it from their own data center to AWS.

While moving Oracle into AWS won't let the company ditch its licensing contract with Oracle, it could be a step in that direction.

To be sure, Jassy's jibes didn't mention Oracle by name, but he showed two news articles about Oracle, both of them based on reporting by Business Insider. Oracle's name and founder Larry Ellison's photo were blurred but still recognizable. 

Showing these articles got a big laugh from the audience.

Jassy noted that "old guard database" vendors are "very expensive" and that they have been known to audit their customers in order to find reasons to charge them more, and sometimes use that audit as a sales negotiation chip. 

As Business Insider has previously reported, Oracle has been increasingly been using such hardball tactics with its customers to encourage them to buy more stuff from Oracle, most especially its all-important cloud computing services.

Oracle has a really strong hold on its database customers. They love the product (even if some of them hate how Oracle sells and charges for it), and they use it to run their most important applications. It's very difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to move from one database to another. 

Plus, the classic database alternatives come from Microsoft, IBM, SAP - all companies who have also have complicated customer contracts.

If Amazon nails this one, and can truly become an easy alternative for database customers, it may have struck gold.

Database services is clearly one of the hot areas that Amazon is now focusing on.

Amazon introduced its direct competitor to Oracle, Aurora, a year ago and said that in that time, it has become "the fastest-growing service on AWS" saying it has grown 127% year over year from Q2 2104 vs 2015.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.