Three decades ago, Larry Ellison, while routinely scanning the IBM Journal of Research and Development, discovered a research paper that described a working prototype for a relational database management system (RDBMS). Showing it to co-workers Bob Miner and Ed Oates at Ampex, he soon learned that no company had committed to commercializing the technology. The trio realized there was tremendous business potential in the relational database, but they may not have realized that they would change the face of business computing forever. Together they founded the company that would become Oracle and developed the Oracle database, named after the CIA project the trio had worked on at the beginning of their association.
Although most large enterprises were using computers in 1977, the systems were enormous and powered arcane and inefficient software. Only highly trained professionals could use the complex machines and manage data input and output. Software developers, meanwhile, sat—computerless—writing code on pads of paper at their desks.
Oracle’s first commercially available database software defied prevailing conventional wisdom that technology would never scale to large amounts of data or extensive numbers of users. The vision, drive, and optimism of Oracle’s founders led to a revolution in enterprise computing.
Thirty years later, Oracle is the gold standard for database technology and applications in enterprises throughout the world, from the largest multinational corporations to the corner coffee shop.
Oracle’s founders spent the 1970s immersed in the wild innovation of the early software industry. But as the Information Age dawned, demand for secure data management forced the young company, then called Relational Software Inc. (RSI), to expand and mature. Customers wanted innovation and security, coupled with a reliable partner to handle their critical business data.
The newly christened Oracle (named for RSI’s flagship product) had key strategies for meeting this demand: simplify data management, build solutions for emerging computing platforms, and increase system interoperability so that data could be synchronized or migrated. By the mid- 1980s, these advances made Oracle the leading RDBMS vendor and propelled the company into new markets for development tools, business applications, and services. This success led Inc. magazine to name Oracle one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States.
In 1986, Oracle went public in a technology boom that also included IPOs from some of the industry’s major players: Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Adobe Systems. Indeed, by the end of the decade, Oracle’s sound business strategy and bold ideas transformed a company of 35 employees into a global, publicly traded powerhouse with more than US$500 million in revenue and a signature corporate campus in Redwood Shores, California.
After a decade of explosive growth and wild success, Oracle management was in a position to invest heavily in innovation. Those investments began to pay dividends in the 1990s, as Oracle revealed significant technological advances in every new product version. Oracle championed client/server computing at the beginning of the decade, as customer requirements began to outpace the limits of terminal computing. Oracle’s flagship database expanded to include unprecedented levels of calculation power (with the introduction of PL/SQL), manageability (with Universal Server), and performance (with cooperative-server technology). But it was Oracle’s prescient internet strategy that drove another era of fierce growth. By building internet-ready products in advance of customer demand, Oracle was able to lead the market when fully functional internet-powered offerings became the standard for enterprise computing. With the dot-com boom (and bust) just around the corner, Oracle’s size, experience, and stability gave the company a unique position for the new millennium—an innovative, entrepreneurial company with thousands of developers and billions of dollars at its disposal.
After four years of intense research and development and two years of customer testing, Oracle released Oracle7 and fundamentally changed everyone’s perceptions about what a database can accomplish. Oracle7 added a vast array of new performance features, administration enhancements, and tools for application development, and security methods that extended the database from the data centre directly into the lines of business. Oracle7 also included technical capabilities such as stored procedures, triggers, and declarative referential integrity that made the database programmable and able to enforce business rules. These technical advances - matched with overwhelming support from customers - made Oracle7 a triumph and a turning point for the company, garnering industry acclaim for its indisputable superiority to other databases on the market. According to Oracle Consulting Architect Dirk Kabcenell, “Oracle7 was the release where we really put it all together.”
In the first years of the new millennium, Oracle’s embrace of internet technology gained traction even as the so-called “internet economy” retrenched. And despite a downturn in enterprise IT investment during the period, Oracle continued to deliver innovation and results. The era has been marked with major technical breakthroughs for Oracle - some, the result of millions of dollars and years of research and development that would set the company’s future course. Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Grid Computing, support for enterprise Linux, and Oracle Fusion all fuel a commitment to innovation and leadership that has defined Oracle for 30 years.
The beginning of the first decade of the new millennium saw many major developments in Oracle’s business: the launch of Oracle E-Business Suite 11i, the acquisitions of PeopleSoft and Siebel, the release of Oracle Database 10g, and the rollout of the industry’s first lifetime support policy. But one innovation from the 2000s signalled a fundamental shift in the economics of enterprise computing: Oracle Applications Unlimited.
Announced in 2006, its promise was reinforced by the unveiling, earlier this year, of major upgrades to all of Oracle’s applications lines. Simply put, Applications Unlimited assures customers of continued enhancements to Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel product lines, beyond the delivery of Oracle Fusion. “Applications Unlimited is not just about giving customers great support - it’s about continuing to enhance the products in a way that will make them more beneficial,” says Oracle Senior Vice President John Wookey.
