Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle Corporation in 1977 with Bob Miner and Ed Oates under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL).[2] Ellison took inspiration[8] 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."[9] He heard about the IBM System R database from an article in the 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. (RSI) in 1979,[10] then again to Oracle Systems Corporation in 1983,[11] to align itself more closely with its flagship product, Oracle Database. The name also drew from the 1977 CIA project codename, which was also Oracle's first customer.[12] At this stage, Bob Miner served as the company's senior programmer. 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.
In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation,[15] officially named Oracle, but is sometimes referred to as Oracle Corporation, the name of the holding company.[16] Part of Oracle Corporation's early success arose from using the C programming language to implement its products. This eased porting to different operating systems most of which support C.
In 2005, Oracle acquired PeopleSoft, an ERP company, and in 2006, Siebel, a CRM company. In 2008 Oracle acquired BEA Systems, an enterprise infrastructure software company, and in 2010, it acquired Sun Microsystems, a computer hardware and software company most famous for its Java programming language.
On July 15, 2013, Oracle transferred its stock listing from the Nasdaq to the NYSE. At the time, it was the largest-ever U.S. market transfer.
In an effort to compete with Amazon Web Services and its products, Oracle announced in 2019 that it was partnering with former rival Microsoft. The alliance called that Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure to 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.
On December 11, 2020, Oracle announced that it was moving its world headquarters from Redwood Shores to Austin, Texas.
On December 20, 2021, Oracle announced the acquisition of Cerner, a health information technology company.[21] The next day, on December 21, Oracle made public the acquisition of Federos, an AI and automation tools company for network performance.[22] The acquisition of Cerner was completed in June 2022 for $28.3 billion in cash.
On August 23, 2022, Oracle was hit with a class action lawsuit, which alleges that Oracle has been operating a "surveillance machine" which tracks in real-time and records indefinitely the personal information of hundreds of millions of people.
In February 2023, the company announced it was going to invest $1.5 billion into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a part of the ongoing tech investment in the country. As a part of the investment, Oracle will be opening a data centre in the country's capital, Riyadh.
