Oracle took another shot at Amazon's dominant cloud business, and claimed its own rival cloud is gaining share.

"Amazon's infrastructure, to be very blunt, is old," Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd said Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco. "Ours is newer and fresher."

Oracle has been playing catch-up in the cloud in recent years, after falling behind Salesforce and Workday in applications and behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in cloud infrastructure.



Yet, both Hurd and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison have insisted that the company is now a cloud leader.

"We sold more cloud recurring revenue than anyone in the industry, bar none," Hurd said.

In the quarter ended in November, Oracle reported 62 percent growth in cloud revenue to $1.05 billion. That expansion has come as the company's software and hardware businesses have declined, leaving total revenue flat year over year.

Meanwhile, sales at AWS jumped 47 percent year over year to $3.5 billion in the fourth quarter.

Still, Oracle is confident.

Hurd said that customers of Oracle's traditional databases aren't going to move that work over to AWS' competitive services. He specifically called out AWS database products Aurora and Redshift, which businesses use to manage data in Amazon's cloud.

By Hurd's estimate, a "very small" number of companies are going to move from an on-premise database (SQL is the one he named) to AWS, in part because that data is then captive to Amazon he said.

"Those databases are the most proprietary in the world," Hurd said. "I'm totally locked into this space."