Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in Santa Clara, California, in 1977 by Bob Miner, Ed Oates, and current chairman of the board and chief technology officer Larry Ellison, Oracle is among the 50 largest companies in the world by market cap, and ranked 66th on the Forbes Global 2000 as of 2025.

The company sells database software (particularly the Oracle Database), enterprise applications, and cloud infrastructure and hardware. Oracle's core application software is a suite of enterprise software products, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), customer experience (CX) and supply chain management (SCM) software.

History

Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates co-founded Oracle on June 16, 1977, in Santa Clara, California, as Software Development Laboratories (SDL). Beginning as consultants with a background in large-scale memory after a project for Ampex, Ellison took inspiration from the 1970 paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database management systems (RDBMS) named "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." He heard about the IBM System R database from an article in an IBM research journal provided by Oates. Ellison wanted to make Oracle's product compatible with System R, but failed to do so as IBM kept the error codes for its DBMS a secret. SDL changed its name to Relational Software, Inc (RSI) in 1979, then again to Oracle Systems Corporation in 1983, to align itself more closely with its flagship product Oracle Database. The name also drew from the codename of a 1977 project for the Central Intelligence Agency, Oracle's first customer; the company received permission to use the code name for the new product. (According to Oracle executive Mike Humphries, Miner told him that the new company had the choice of the CIA database project or another offer to develop a compiler for the PDP-4, and the founders flipped a coin to decide.)

Miner served as a senior programmer, and Oates also worked in development. The three founders decided that Ellison was the worst programmer so he became the salesman. Understanding both customers and technology, Ellison designed database tables that he used to demonstrate the power of SQL to customers. By February 1983 the Rosen Electronics Letter said that Oracle was "the most comprehensive offering we've seen" among databases, with good marketing and a substantial installed base encouraging developers to write software for it. The newsletter said that revenue in fiscal 1983 would be about $8 million and would double in 1984. On March 12, 1986, the company had its initial public offering. In 1989, Oracle moved its world headquarters to the Redwood Shores neighborhood of Redwood City, California, though its campus was not completed until 1995. The company hired so many from top universities that Humphries compared it to "Cargill buying crops". Some new employees worked as receptionists or distributed coffee until more suitable positions became available.

Oracle in the late 1980s began selling enterprise software running on the database, starting with financial software, then manufacturing. Many at Oracle wanted to discontinue applications; the first several versions were weak, they competed with the company's independent software vendors and value-added reseller partners, and applications were never profitable for Oracle until after 2000. Selling them (and acquiring vendors such as JD Edwards and PeopleSoft, the latter being the second hostile takeover in the history of software) nonetheless allowed Oracle to compete with SAP; by the mid-2000s it was the world's largest enterprise software vendor. The company's Ken Jacobs later said:

It created a strategic footprint in our customers. It gave us a whole stack, a credible stack. And we could now sell at a higher point into the companies, into the board room. And, our large customers wanted to consider us a strategic partner, rather than just a vendor of technology. So, it has, actually, had a big impact on the way our sales force could sell.

In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation, officially named Oracle, but is sometimes referred to as Oracle Corporation, the name of the holding company.

In 2010, Oracle launched Fusion Applications to unify the features and technologies of acquisitions PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and JD Edwards, into a single suite.

On July 15, 2013, Oracle transferred its stock listing from Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange. At the time, it was the largest-ever U.S. market transfer.

In 2018, Oracle opened a new office in the neighboorhod of East Riverside in southeast Austin, Texas. In December 2020, Oracle announced that it was moving its world headquarters from Redwood Shores to Austin, Texas.

In an effort to compete with Amazon Web Services and its products, Oracle announced in 2019 it was partnering with former rival Microsoft. The alliance claimed that Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure would be directly connected, allowing customers of each to store data on both cloud computing platforms and run software on either Oracle or Azure. Some saw this not only as an attempt to compete with Amazon but also with Google and Salesforce, which acquired Looker and Tableau Software, respectively. In 2023, Oracle and Microsoft expanded their partnership to deliver Oracle database services on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure running inside Microsoft Azure.

A year later, Oracle announced similar partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, making the Oracle database available in all four major hyperscaler providers.

In December 2021, Oracle announced the acquisition of Cerner, a health information technology company. The acquisition of Cerner was completed on June 8, 2022, for US$28.3 billion in cash. Also in December 2021, Oracle announced the acquisition of Federos, an artificial intelligence (AI) and automation tools company for network performance.

In February 2023, the company announced it was going to invest $1.5 billion into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including opening a data center in the country's capital, Riyadh.

In April 2024, Oracle announced it was moving its world headquarters from Austin to a new complex in Nashville, Tennessee. No timeframe was given.

In June 2024, Oracle announced a $1 billion investment in Spain to enhance artificial intelligence and cloud computing. This investment will create a new cloud region in Madrid in partnership with Telefónica. The goal is to help Spanish businesses and the public sector with digital transformation and to meet European Union regulations. The same year, the company announced investments in Japan and Malaysia for US$8 billion and US$6.5 billion, respectively.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump announced Stargate, a joint venture by Oracle, OpenAI, SoftBank and investment firm MGX to invest $500 billion over four years in artificial…