Oracle was founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates in Santa Clara, California. The company built its first product — a relational database management system — based on Edgar Codd’s research papers from IBM. Oracle Database became the most widely used commercial database in the world.
From that foundation, Oracle expanded into enterprise applications through major acquisitions: PeopleSoft ($10.3B, 2005), Siebel Systems ($5.8B, 2006), BEA Systems ($8.5B, 2008), Sun Microsystems ($7.4B, 2010), and NetSuite ($9.3B, 2016). These deals gave Oracle products across ERP, CRM, HCM, and supply chain management.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is the company’s cloud computing platform, which has been gaining market share despite being much smaller than AWS, Azure, and GCP. OCI has been particularly successful in winning AI workloads, signing deals to provide GPU infrastructure for companies including xAI and OpenAI.
Annual revenue exceeded $53 billion in fiscal year 2024, with cloud services becoming an increasingly dominant share. Oracle’s database business remains enormously profitable — Oracle Database and MySQL are used by the majority of large enterprises worldwide.
Larry Ellison remains chairman and CTO and is one of the wealthiest people in the world. Safra Catz has served as CEO since 2014. Oracle relocated its headquarters from Redwood Shores, California, to Austin, Texas, in 2020.
The company employs over 160,000 people globally. Oracle is known for its aggressive sales culture and complex licensing, which has created a large ecosystem of Oracle consultants and a consistent stream of licensing disputes.
