Brief description of the products/services/business concepts

Today Oracle is the gold standard for database technology and applications in enterprises throughout the world—the company is the world's leading supplier of information management software and the world's second largest independent software company. And Oracle's complete portfolio of application, database, engineered systems, Enterprise Management, Middleware, Operating Systems, servers, storage, software, and networking products are engineered to work together to deliver record-breaking performance, simplified management, and cost-saving efficiencies.

Oracle 9i	Oracle 10g	Oracle 11g

Oracle also provides Oracle Consulting, Oracle Financing, Oracle On Demand, Oracle Support, and Oracle University as their services for the worldwide.

Throughout its history Oracle has proved it can build for the future on the foundation of its innovations and its intimate knowledge of customer challenges and successes analyzed by the best technical and business minds in the world. The company has leveraged its immense size and strength to serve its customers, and to implement key technology and business decisions that upend conventional wisdom and take its products and services in new directions.

Profile of the Entrepreneur and the business.

Larry Ellison is the founder and CEO of the enterprise software company Oracle Corporation. He is also a well-known American billionaire and philanthropist.

Lawrence Joseph Ellison, better known as Larry Ellison, was born in New York City on August 17, 1944 to a young unwed Jewish mother. In order to provide her son with a better upbringing, Ellison's mother gave him to Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison, her aunt and uncle in Chicago. They formally adopted Ellison when he was only nine months old. Ellison didn't meet or reunite with his birth mother until he was 48.

Ellison's adoptive father took the name Ellison when he entered the US from his native Crimea as a tribute to Ellis Island. He also hoped to conceal his Jewish heritage. In his early years, Ellison grew up in the middle-class neighbourhood of Chicago's South Shore. Although he fondly recalls the nurturing and supportive nature of his adoptive mother, his adoptive father was often distant and cold.

Although he was labelled as an intelligent child, Larry Ellison was inattentive in his studies. After graduating from South Shore High School, Ellison attended the University of Illinois but left at the end of his second year after the death of his adoptive mother. He spent the summer living in Northern California with his friend Chuck Weiss then continued his studies at the University of Chicago. He only spent one term at the University during which time he discovered computer programming and permanently relocated to Northern California. He was 20 years old at the time.

Although his short attention span worked against him during his academic career, Ellison's drive and impatience worked perfectly in line with the needs of computer programming. He worked for a variety of companies as a computer programmer and spent his free time hiking and climbing in Yosemite. In 1967 he married Adda Quinn. The marriage lasted seven years and ended in a divorce in 1974.

During the later years of his marriage, Larry Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation as a programmer on a database project for the CIA. Ellison named the project "Oracle", a name he would later use to signify his own company. While working on the project, Ellison read "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" by Edgar F. Codd which inspired him to front the initial $2000 as the start-up fee for his own database systems company named Software Development Laboratories. It switched names a few times and ended up as Oracle.

Larry Ellison wanted his Oracle database system to be compatible with the IBM System R, but IBM refused to share the code necessary to make this possible. So Ellison was forced to release his system as a singular data sharing system. The original release was called Oracle 2, despite the lack of an original Oracle or Oracle 1. During this time Ellison also married Nancy Wheeler Jenkins from whom he divorced one year later.

IBM, Ellison's initial rival, was the primary database system for companies but failed to initiate a system for smaller companies and microcomputers. Ellison, along with other entrepreneurs took advantage of the void and flooded the market with their systems. Oracle, Sybase, and eventually Microsoft took over the market.

Just before the rise of Oracle, Larry Ellison met and married his third wife, Barbara Boothe, with whom he had two children. They divorced in 1986 after three years of marriage.

As Oracle rose to power along with other database systems, its primary competitor, Sybase, was taken over by PowerSoft and lost some of its hold on the market. Although the original Sybase software was sold to Microsoft and turned into the well-known "SQL Server", this merger allowed Oracle to recover from a financial fall and lead the open market in database systems.

For a short time Larry Ellison served as director of Apple Computer when Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997. He resigned the position in 2002, sighting his inability to attend formal meetings, and one year later married his fourth wife, Melanie Craft. Steve Jobs served as the official photographer at the wedding. Lawrence Ellison has five children, two with his third wife and three with Melanie Craft.

Brief introduction of how the business started

More than three and a half decades ago Larry Ellison saw an opportunity other companies missed: a description of a working prototype for a relational database. No company had committed to commercializing the technology, but Ellison and co-founders Bob Miner and Ed Oates realized the tremendous business potential of the relational database model—but they may not have realized that the company they formed would change the face of business computing forever.

Throughout its history Oracle has proved it can build for the future on the foundation of its innovations and its intimate knowledge of customer challenges and successes analysed by the best technical and business minds in the world. The company has leveraged its immense size and strength to serve its customers, and to implement key technology and business decisions that upend conventional wisdom and take its products and services in new directions.

How the business gained success etc

Innovation is the engine of Oracle's success. Oracle was one of the first companies to make its business applications available through the internet - an idea that is now pervasive. Oracle has introduced Oracle Fusion Middleware products and functionality that connect all levels of enterprise technology, ensuring customers access to the knowledge they need to respond to market conditions with speed and agility - and now Oracle Fusion Middleware is the #1 middleware software.

What does Oracle have in store for tomorrow? We will provide our customers with hardware and software engineered to work together - integrated from the disk to applications software that meets their business needs and solves their business problems. And we will continue to innovate and to lead the industry, while always making sure that we focus on solving the problems of the customers that rely on our technology.

The ups and downs of the entrepreneur and his business

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.

Business Philosophy and business strategies used

Through our acquisition activities, Oracle seeks to strengthen its product offerings, accelerate innovation, meet customer demand more rapidly, and expand partner opportunities. An integral part of Oracle's Mergers and Acquisitions philosophy is our consistent commitment to customer service and product support while achieving our financial return objectives and creating value for our shareholders.

Achievements attained in terms of Market Share, Sales Turnover, Number of Outlets, Recognition, Adoption and Acceptance of Product

On March 15, 1986 - nearly a decade after the founding of the company - Oracle made an initial public stock offering of 2.1 million shares on the NASDAQ exchange. At the time, the company had 450 employees and annual revenue of US$55 mil­lion. Twenty years later, Oracle has a global work­force of 65,000 and annual revenue topping US$15 billion. In October 2006, CEO Larry Ellison and Presidents Charles Phillips and Safra Catz joined senior NASDAQ executives in San Francisco to celebrate a 20-year partnership on the exchange— a partnership that has paid off well for both Oracle and investors. “A $10,000 investment in the initial public offering of Oracle back in 1986 would now be worth $4,082,280,” says Ellison, referring to the stock’s closing price that day.

Brash software titan still at helm of Oracle Systems, database outfit he cofounded 30 years ago. Reshaping the industry with a massive shopping spree; spent $19 billion buying 21 software companies in past 3 years. Biggest acquisitions: PeopleSoft for $11 billion, Siebel Systems for $5.9 billion. Deals added $4.6 billion to company's annual revenue, 18,000 to employee count. Combination makes Oracle, already strong in database management, a big player in business applications like accounting and personnel. Now stitching it all together into software suite Fusion for release by 2008. Predicts earnings will grow 20% a year for the rest of the decade. Chicago native studied physics at U of Chicago; didn't graduate. Started Oracle in 1977. Took public in 1986, a day before Microsoft. Companies have been fiercely competitive ever since. Spends lots of time on distractions: tweaking his 40-acre Japanese-style estate, cruising on his 453-foot yacht, Rising Sun (world's second largest). Plans to sail in 2007 America's Cup in Spain. "Life is short. I'm not going to spend every minute of it with Oracle." Recently rescinded a $100 million gift to Harvard University. Has yet to announce where the funds will go; must give the money away as part of an insider trading suit settlement. Turned blasé on being a billionaire: "Money is just a method of keeping score now. I certainly don't need more money. No one needs this much money."

How the product / company got its name

During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison worked for Ampex Corporation. One of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979, the company was renamed Relational Software Inc., later renamed Oracle after the flagship product Oracle database. He had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to be compatible with it, but IBM made this impossible by refusing to share System R's code. The initial release of Oracle was Oracle 2; there was no Oracle 1. The release number was intended to imply that all of the bugs had been worked out of an earlier version.

Unique features about the product /services/business concept that makes it outstanding

With more than 380,000 customers—including 100 of the Fortune 100—and with deployments across a wide variety of industries in more than 145 countries around the globe, Oracle offers an optimized and fully integrated stack of business hardware and software systems.

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center–from servers and storage, to database and middleware, through applications. Oracle systems:

1. Provide better performance, reliability, security, and flexibility
2. Lower the cost and complexity of IT implementation and management 
3. Deliver greater productivity, agility, and better business intelligence 

For customers needing modular solutions, Oracle's open architecture and multiple operating-system options also give customers unmatched benefits from best-of-breed products in every layer of the stack, allowing them to build the best infrastructure for their enterprise.

Key factor contributing to the success of the business

“ I’ve thought a lot about why Oracle was successful. I really think that it was Larry Ellison. There were a lot of other databases out there that we beat. It was really Larry’s charisma, vision, and his deter­mination to make this thing work no matter what. It’s just the way Larry thinks. I can give you an example of his thought processes: We had space allocated to us, and we needed to get our terminals strung to the computer room next door. We didn’t have anywhere to really string the wiring. Larry picks up a hammer, crashes a hole in the middle of the wall, and says, ‘There you go.’ It’s just the way he thinks—make a hole, make it happen somehow.”

—Bruce Scott, Coarchitect and Coauthor of the first three versions of Oracle Database

Etc

Milestone

1977 Software Development Laboratories, the precursor to Oracle, is founded by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates.

1978 Oracle Version 1, written in assembly language, runs on PDP-11 under RSX, in 128K of memory. Implementa­tion separates Oracle code and user code. Oracle V1 is never officially released.

1979 Oracle Version 2, the first commercial SQL relational database man­agement system, is released. The company changes its name to Relational Software Inc. (RSI).

1982 Relational Software Inc. (RSI) gets a new name—Oracle Systems—and hosts its first user conference, in San Francisco.

1983 Oracle Version 3, built on the C pro­gramming language, is the first RDBMS to run on mainframes, minicomputers, and PCs—giving customers the ability to use the software in almost any enter­prise computing environment.

1984 Larry Ellison tells Computerworld magazine, “I’ve said that by 1985 everybody will be buying relational DBMS. It looks like that’s coming true.”

1985 Oracle keeps pace with emerging computing models with the release of Oracle Version 5, one of the first relational database systems to operate in client/server environments. 1986 Oracle goes public on the NASDAQ exchange.

1987 Already the world’s larg­est database company, Oracle launches a new effort to build enterprise applica­tions that take advantage of the powerful Oracle Database.

1988 Oracle Version 6 debuts with several major advances: Row-level locking allows multiple users to work in the same table by processing only the specific data used in a transac­tion. Hot backup reduces system main­tenance overhead by allowing employees to continue working in the system while administrators duplicate and archive data. PL/SQL allows users to process data while it remains in the database.

1989 Oracle prepares for the internet boom—a decade before it happens—with database support of online transac­tion processing (OLTP). Oracle moves its headquarters to its signature Redwood Shores, California, campus.

1990 Only three years after creating an applications division, the company launches Oracle Applications Release 8, which includes accounting programs designed for the emerging client/server computing environment.

1992 Oracle7 wins industry acclaim and customer support as a database with groundbreak­ing functionality and several architectural changes.

1993 Oracle is the first software company to rewrite business applications for client/server environ­ments, automating business processes from a centralized data center.

1994 Oracle earns the industry’s first independent security evaluations, adding third-party assurance of the strength of Oracle’s products.

1995 Oracle becomes the first major software company to announce a comprehensive internet strategy.

1996 With Oracle7 Release 7.3, Oracle delivers Universal Server, allowing customers to use Oracle to manage any type of data—text, video, maps, sound, or images.

1998 With Oracle8 Database and Oracle Applications 10.7, Oracle is the first enterprise computing company to embrace the Java programming language.

1999 Only four years after Oracle announced a Web strategy, internet capabilities saturate every Oracle offering, from support for open standard technologies such as XML and Linux to the latest versions of Oracle product lines, such as Oracle Applications 11i and Oracle8i Database.

2000 Oracle ships Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i, the industry’s first integrated suite of enterprise applica­tions.

2001 Oracle9i Database adds Oracle Real Application Clusters, giving customers the option to run their IT on connected, low-cost servers—expanding performance, scalability, and availability of the database.

2002 Oracle launches the “Unbreakable” campaign to mark the unprecedented 15 independent security evaluations earned by Oracle Database.

2003 Oracle debuts Oracle Database 10g, the first grid computing product available for the enterprise. Oracle Grid Computing serves computing power across the enterprise as a utility, auto­matically shifting processing loads based on demand.

2004 Executives declare Oracle “the Information Company” and make bold moves to secure the com-pany’s position as the only software vendor capable of addressing growing demands for data-intense business prac­tices.

2005 Oracle completes the acqui­sition of applications rival PeopleSoft and announces its intention to acquire Siebel Systems. The deals—just two among the dozens of companies Oracle purchased in the mid-2000s—signal the beginning of an era of consolidation in the software industry.

2006 Oracle deepens a 30-year commitment to open standards comput­ing with Unbreakable Linux—giving cus­tomers the same level of support for Linux as they expect for other Oracle products. The move in effect certifies the operating system for enterprise computing.