Oracle Corporation is an international computer technology corporation headquartered in Redwood City, California. She was one of the most valuable companies in the world in 2011-2013 and again in 2015-2018. In January 2019, it overtook Microsoft as the second most valuable company in the world by market capitalization.
The company specializes primarily in the development and sale of software and database technologies, cloud systems, enterprise software – in particular proprietary brand databases – as well as technologies related to artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics. Oracle is also a major provider of consulting services to business and governments around the world.
The current CEO of Oracle is Safra Catz, who replaced founder Larry Ellison on September 18, 2014, when he stepped down after 37 years as Oracle’s chairman of the board. In 2018, the company’s revenues were ~ $ 38 billion.
Larry Ellison and Bob Miner founded a consulting firm called Software Development Laboratories in 1977. Ellison hired Ray Lane as executive vice president of sales and field operations in 1982, then investor Mark Hurd in 1983, later becoming chief executive officer in 1998. In 1982, the company changed its name to Oracle Systems Corporation, based in one of Ellison’s offices, and began selling the Oracle database.
The company began developing a relational database management system (RDBMS) called Oracle Version 2 on March 8, 1977, which would become the first commercially available mainframe RDBMS. Version 2 introduced many subroutines, including the SQL query language.
The Oracle RDBMS Software Development Kit (SDK) was released in 1980. It was considered a competitor to Sybase and SQL Server due to its compatibility with Data General’s COBOL and DB2. The differences between Oracle and some of its competitors are that Oracle has more built-in routines, does not require customers to purchase additional hardware (such as IBM Power Systems servers), reads metadata information sequentially instead of locking the entire database during table scans and runs more than twice as fast on System z mainframes.