Oracle Corporation | Definition, History, & Facts (2024)

Oracle Corporation, global corporation and brand that develops and markets computer software applications for business. The company is best known for its Oracle database software, a relational database management system, and for computer systems and software, such as Solaris and Java, acquired in its purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010. Oracle is based in Redwood Shores, California.

The company, initially called Software Development Laboratories, was founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison and Bob Miner, computer programmers at the American electronics company Ampex Corporation, and by Ed Oates, Ellison’s supervisor at Ampex. Inspired by a research paper written by British-born computer scientist Edgar F. Codd that outlined a relational database model, Ellison and his colleagues saw commercial potential in the approach, which organized large amounts of data in a way that allowed for efficient storage and quick retrieval. The trio set to work developing and marketing a program based on Codd’s data management theory. In 1979 the company released Oracle, the earliest commercial relational database program to use Structured Query Language (SQL), and it quickly became popular. Its first customer was the U.S. Air Force, which used the program at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio.

Known for innovation and aggressive marketing, the company, renamed Oracle in 1982 after its flagship product, grew rapidly throughout the 1980s, going public in 1986. In 1987 Oracle became the largest database management company in the world. Although Oracle’s eponymous database has steadily increased in popularity, much of the company’s growth has come through its aggressive acquisitions of software companies with products for a range of business and technology applications. In its history Oracle lays claim to buying scores of companies, including high-profile multibillion-dollar purchases of PeopleSoft (2005), Siebel (2006), BEA (2008), Sun Microsystems (2010), and NetSuite (2016).

Disappointing earnings in the early 1990s led to a period of restructuring, and the company faced increasing competition in the database technology market. The company also stumbled in the mid-1990s with its investment in and vocal support for the Network Computer (NC). The NC was not as fully equipped as a standard personal computer and relied on computer servers for its data and software. Ellison, now Oracle’s chief executive officer (CEO), and partners such as Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy bet that business users of computers would adopt NCs, which would slow the growth and influence of archcompetitor Microsoft Corporation. That ploy failed, and personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system continued to dominate business users’ desktops.

Ellison met with more success with his early embrace of the Internet. Oracle developed products that were compatible with World Wide Web technologies, which helped the company to grow along with its acquisitions.

Oracle remained a leader in database technology, with versions available for many different operating systems and for a variety of computers ranging from large mainframes to microcomputers. With the purchase of Sun Microsystems, Oracle acquired not only the computer programming language Java and the operating system Solaris but also the popular open-source database MySQL, which Sun had acquired in 2008 for $1 billion. The European Union, before it approved the purchase in January 2010, required assurances from Oracle that it would continue to develop and support MySQL. Later that year, Oracle filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Google, Inc., alleging that Google had illegally used elements of Java in its development of the Android operating system for mobile phones. After years of litigation and a remanded trial, a jury found in 2016 that Google had not violated Oracle’s copyrights.