Oracle Corp.

Oracle is global corporation that develops and markets 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, which it acquired when it purchased the software company Sun Microsystems in 2010. Oracle is based in Austin, Texas.

Origins and early growth

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 swift 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 for its flagship product, grew rapidly throughout the 1980s, going public in 1986. In 1987, Oracle became the largest database management company in the world.

Acquisitions and expansion

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. Over its history, Oracle has acquired numerous companies, including the high-profile, multibillion-dollar purchases of PeopleSoft (2005), Siebel (2006), BEA (2008), Sun Microsystems (2010), and NetSuite (2016).

Competition and the Internet era

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, by then 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 Oracle’s greatest competitor, Microsoft. 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 web technologies, which helped the company and its acquisitions grow.

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.

In December 2020, Oracle moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, from Redwood City, California. The company cited its updated work-location policies, while observers noted Texas’s lower costs and business-friendly regulatory climate as additional factors. The relocation placed Oracle among several major technology companies that shifted corporate bases out of California during the period.

Legal disputes and privacy controversies

Later that year, Oracle filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Google, alleging that the search engine giant 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.

In 2022, Oracle faced a class-action lawsuit alleging that it had tracked and collected the personal information of about five billion users worldwide without adequate disclosure. The company earned more than $40 billion in revenue that year, partly by selling customer data to private and governmental entities, according to court documents.

The plaintiffs argued that, unlike other companies that publish clear policies on data collection, Oracle failed to inform users about how their information was gathered and used. After unsuccessfully seeking to have the case dismissed, Oracle agreed in July 2024 to pay $115 million to settle the claims.

Cloud and AI expansion

In September 2025, Oracle secured a series of unprecedented multibillion-dollar contracts, including a $300 billion five-year agreement with OpenAI, marking a major strategic shift toward large-scale cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI).

The deal requires Oracle to deliver about 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity, roughly equivalent to the electricity output of more than two Hoover Dams, and represents a scale of computing power far exceeding OpenAI’s current revenue base.

Oracle also secured additional multibillion-dollar cloud infrastructure contracts with other leading AI companies, including xAI and Meta Platforms (META)—parent of Facebook. As a result, Oracle said it expects its cloud infrastructure revenue to jump 77% to $18 billion in its 2026 fiscal year and rise to $144 billion within five years.

These contracts caused Oracle’s order backlog, future revenue from signed contracts, to swell to about $455 billion as of August 31, 2025, more than four times the level of the previous year. Analysts forecast that backlog could exceed $500 billion as more contracts are finalized. The market reaction was dramatic: on September 10, 2025, Oracle’s stock surged nearly 36% in a single day, its largest one-day gain since 1992.

The stock surge temporarily elevated Ellison to the position of the world’s richest person, briefly surpassing Elon Musk before market values settled. Analysts described these developments as a turning point for Oracle, signifying its transformation from a traditional database and enterprise software company into a central provider of global AI infrastructure.

References

Stuart Read, The Oracle Edge: How Oracle Corporation’s Take No Prisoners Strategy Has Created a $8 Billion Software Powerhouse (2000); Karen Southwick, Everyone Else Must Fail: The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison (2003); Matthew Symonds and Larry Ellison, Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle (2003).