Dive Brief:

• Oracle's cloud revenue grew $1.36 billion in the first quarter, according to Venture Beat. That represents an increase of 13% from last year.
• The company's infrastructure as a service revenue alone was up 23%, according to CNBC.
• Company founder and CTO Larry Ellison said on an earnings call that he expects the company's PaaS and IaaS businesses to grow rapidly in coming quarters.

Dive Insight:

Oracle has been pushing its public cloud offerings hard since September when the company introduced its second-generation cloud infrastructure at Oracle World.

At that time, Ellison announced plans to heavily challenge AWS in the Infrastructure as a Service space. "Amazon's lead is over," Ellison said. "Amazon is going to have serious competition going forward."

The company still has a way to go, though.

AWS cloud revenue jumped 42% to $3.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter. But credit Oracle for getting some respectable market traction in a short amount of time. Last year, Oracle was nowhere to be found on Gartner's Magic Quadrant ranking of cloud leaders. The firm said Oracle's offering was too new to earn a ranking at that time. Oracle made the Magic Quadrant ranking this year, though Gartner also cautioned that Oracle's offering is "currently a bare-bones 'minimum viable product.' "