Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational technology firm based in Austin, Texas. It was co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Bob Miner, Ed Oates, and Larry Ellison, who remains chairman and chief technology officer. As of 2025, Oracle ranks among the world’s 50 largest companies by market capitalization and sits at 66th on the Forbes Global 2000. The company’s main offerings include database software (notably the Oracle Database), enterprise applications, and cloud infrastructure and hardware. Its core application software suite covers enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), customer experience (CX), and supply chain management (SCM).

The company began on June 16, 1977, as Software Development Laboratories (SDL), founded by Ellison, Miner, and Oates. They started as consultants with experience in large-scale memory from a project at Ampex. Ellison was inspired by Edgar F. Codd’s 1970 paper on relational database management systems, and Oates shared an article about IBM’s System R database from an IBM research journal. Ellison wanted Oracle’s product to work with System R but failed because IBM kept its error codes secret. SDL renamed itself Relational Software, Inc. (RSI) in 1979, then Oracle Systems Corporation in 1983, to match its flagship Oracle Database. The name came from a 1977 CIA project codename—Oracle’s first customer—and the company got permission to use it. According to Oracle executive Mike Humphries, Miner said the founders flipped a coin to choose between the CIA database project and another offer to develop a compiler for the PDP-4.

Miner worked as a senior programmer, and Oates also handled development. The founders decided Ellison was the worst programmer, so he became the salesman. He understood both customers and technology, designing database tables to demonstrate SQL’s power to clients. By February 1983, the Rosen Electronics Letter called Oracle “the most comprehensive offering we’ve seen” among databases, praising its marketing and installed base that encouraged developers to write software for it. The newsletter estimated fiscal 1983 revenue at about $8 million, doubling in 1984. The company went public on March 12, 1986. In 1989, Oracle moved its world headquarters to Redwood Shores, California, though the campus wasn’t finished until 1995. The company hired so many from top universities that Humphries compared it to “Cargill buying crops”; some new hires worked as receptionists or coffee distributors until suitable roles opened.

In the late 1980s, Oracle began selling enterprise software running on its database, starting with financial software and then manufacturing. Many inside Oracle wanted to drop applications; early versions were weak, they competed with the company’s own independent software vendors and value-added resellers, and applications didn’t turn a profit until after 2000. Selling them—and acquiring vendors like JD Edwards and PeopleSoft (the second hostile takeover in software history)—let Oracle compete with SAP, and by the mid-2000s it became the world’s largest enterprise software vendor. Ken Jacobs later said this created a strategic footprint in customers, giving Oracle a full stack and allowing it to sell at a higher level into companies and boardrooms, making large customers see it as a strategic partner rather than just a technology vendor.

In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation, officially just Oracle, though the holding company is sometimes called Oracle Corporation. In 2010, Oracle launched Fusion Applications to combine features from acquisitions PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and JD Edwards into one suite. On July 15, 2013, Oracle moved its stock listing from Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange, the largest U.S. market transfer at the time. In 2018, Oracle opened an office in East Riverside, Austin, Texas, and in December 2020 announced it was moving its world headquarters from Redwood Shores to Austin.

To compete with Amazon Web Services, Oracle announced a partnership with former rival Microsoft in 2019. The alliance connected Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure directly, letting customers store data on both platforms and run software on either. Some saw this as a move against Amazon, Google, and Salesforce (which had acquired Looker and Tableau). In 2023, Oracle and Microsoft expanded their partnership to deliver Oracle database services on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure inside Microsoft Azure. A year later, Oracle announced similar partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, making the Oracle database available across all four major hyperscalers. In December 2021, Oracle announced the acquisition of Cerner, a health information technology company, completed on June 8, 2022, for $28.3 billion in cash. Also in December 2021, Oracle announced the acquisition of Federos, an artificial intelligence and automation tool.