Lionel Sujay Vailshery
Research expert covering the consumer electronics industry
When most enterprises were managing vast amounts of data with inefficient and arcane software, Oracle had a clear goal: to revolutionize data management with an innovative, powerful, and user-friendly database management system, setting it on a path to becoming a global tech leader. Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates, with two thousand U.S. dollars in market capitalization in 1977, founded a small software development company called Software Development Laboratories in Santa Clara, California. In 1982, the company rebranded itself as Oracle Systems Corporation and, in 1995, as Oracle Corporation. As of 2023, it has become one of the leading relational database management systems worldwide.
Oracle's database management systems (DBMS)
The company's first commercially available software was a relational database management system (RDBMS) called Oracle Version 2. The software was launched in 1979 and slowly started gaining attention. Within eight years, Oracle had released version 5.1 of the software and decided it was time to go public. At the end of the 80s, Oracle was a global business with more than 500 million U.S. dollars in revenue. Moreover, by the fiscal year 2023, Oracle's annual revenue had increased close to 50 billion U.S. dollars, while its reported net income was over 8 billion U.S. dollars. The most recent version of the company's RDBMS was Oracle 23ai, released in May 2024, bringing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to the Oracle database.
Service and hardware businesses
Oracle's core business segment is the cloud and license segment, generating approximately 35 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in the financial year 2023 alone. In 2010, Oracle also acquired Sun Microsystems, a company specializing in computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services. Since then, Oracle has also been involved in the manufacture of scalable engineered systems, servers, and storage. Oracle is also one of the top cloud service providers, with its Oracle cloud infrastructure. Moreover, Oracle Academy, it provides training in technology and computing skills in collaboration with governments and educational institutions.
A powerful brand and a wealthy founder
With an estimated brand value of almost 90 billion U.S. dollars, Oracle is ranked among the world's top 20 most valuable brands. The company is also one of the top 100 largest companies in the world by market value. Larry Ellison, long considered the driving force behind Oracle's success, was the third-richest person in the United States in 2023 and the fourth richest in the world, with an estimated net worth of around 137 billion U.S. dollars in 2023.
