December 14, 2021: -Oracle’s cloud infrastructure service is still way behind Amazon. But that doesn’t keep Larry Ellison, Oracle’s billionaire co-founder, from taking every available opportunity to tout his cloud over the competition.

On Thursday, the end of Oracle’s quarterly earnings conference call, Ellison made a veiled swipe at Amazon Web Services, suffering a major outage this week, which takes down a wide swath of websites and internet services and knocking out critical tools used by Amazon’s delivery workers.

Ellison didn’t reference the outage, but it doesn’t take much reading amid the lines to get his meaning.

“Let me close with a note that I’m going to paraphrase from a huge telecommunications company who is using our cloud and all the other three North American clouds, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft,” Ellison said. “And the note said the one thing we’ve noticed about Oracle, Oracle’s cloud, is that it never goes down. We cannot say that about any of the other clouds. We think this is a critical differentiator.”

On Thursday, Oracle shares increased 11% in extended trading after reporting better-than-expected earnings for the fiscal second quarter. Before the close, the stock was up 38% this year, trouncing Amazon’s 7% gain.

Taking a step back, Amazon has been the better bet for a long time, with AWS turning Oracle’s cloud infrastructure business primarily into an afterthought. Over the past decade, Amazon shares are up 1,700%, while Oracle’s market cap has tripled. Oracle’s revenue in the quarter increased 6% to $10.4 billion. And in the few quarters, revenue at AWS surged 39% to $16.1 billion.

According to Synergy Research Group, AWS controls 33% of the global cloud infrastructure market at the end of the second quarter, followed by Microsoft at 20% and Google at 10%. Four different companies stand between Google and Oracle in terms of market share.

That’s never stopped Ellison in the past. In an earnings call in 2016, Ellison told analysts that “We handle the Oracle database much better than Amazon does.” That same year, at Oracle’s massive user conference, Ellison railed against Amazon’s cloud security. He is following up in 2018 by saying that Amazon will struggle to get off of Oracle’s database, referring to a CNBC report that said Amazon looks to stop using Oracle’s technology.