Oracle Corporation


Oracle Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by its current chairman of the board and chief technology officer Larry Ellison, Oracle is among the 20 largest companies in the world by market cap, and ranked 66th on the Forbes Global 2000 as of 2025.
The company sells database software, enterprise applications, and cloud infrastructure and hardware. Oracle's core application software is a suite of enterprise software products, including enterprise resource planning, human capital management, customer relationship management, enterprise performance management, Customer Experience Commerce and supply chain management software.

History

, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates co-founded Oracle in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, as Software Development Laboratories. 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 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 their DBMS a secret. SDL changed its name to Relational Software, Inc 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.
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 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 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:
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.
Oracle acquired the following technology companies:
  1. PeopleSoft, an ERP company
  2. Siebel, a CRM company
  3. BEA Systems, an enterprise infrastructure software company
  4. Sun Microsystems, a computer hardware and software company.
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 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.
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 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 centre 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.
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 intelligence infrastructure in the US. Also in 2025, the company announced additional investments in the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands for US$5 billion and US$3 billion, respectively.
In September 2025, Oracle announced it was promoting Clay Magouyrk, president of cloud infrastructure, and Mike Sicilia, president of industries, to become co-CEOs. They replaced Safra Catz, who held the position for 11 years, and transitioned to a new role as executive vice chair.
In January 2026, social media platform TikTok announced it finalized a deal to change ownership of its U.S. operations, with Oracle, MGX and private equity firm Silver Lake each owning a 15% stake in the venture, while ByteDance retained a 19.9% stake.

Products and services

Databases

The Oracle Database was released in 2004 as 10g. Subsequently, the product was released several times, with the newest issue released as 12c in 2018. Oracle released its Autonomous Database in 2018, Oracle Database 23ai in 2024, and issued its newest release Oracle AI Database 26ai in 2025.
Oracle Corporation has acquired and developed the following additional database technologies:
Oracle Fusion Middleware is a family of middleware software products, including application server, system integration, business process management, user interaction, content management, identity management and business intelligence products.

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, Oracle's enterprise-search offering, gives users the ability to search for content across multiple locations, including websites, XML files, file servers, content management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, customer relationship management systems, business intelligence systems, and databases.

Product Lines

, software sold by Oracle based on its own database, first appeared in the late 1980s. Oracle Corporation maintains a number of product lines, such as:
Oracle Enterprise Manager is a web-based monitoring and management tool for Oracle products, including database management, middleware management, application management, hardware and virtualization management and cloud management.
The Primavera products of Oracle's Construction & Engineering Global Business Unit consist of project-management software.

Development software

Oracle Corporation's tools for developing applications include :