Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation [ˈɔːɹəkl̩ ˌkɔːɹpəˈɹeɪʃn̩] is an American software and hardware manufacturer headquartered in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in the development and marketing of computer hardware and software for enterprise customers - particularly the Oracle Database system. Oracle is one of the world's largest software manufacturers by revenue. Oracle employs more than 138,000 people and has 430,000 customers in 175 countries. The German headquarters is in Munich, since 2001 there is Oracle Direct in Potsdam. There are eleven offices in Germany. In Switzerland the company has four, in Austria one branch. In addition to the database product Oracle Database, Oracle produces and sells Oracle Fusion Middleware as well as the JEE servers Oracle Application Server and Oracle WebLogic.

In the enterprise solutions market (Package Applications), Oracle is represented by Oracle Applications, E-Business Suite, Hyperion Performance Management, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, JD Edwards World and Siebel Systems.

With revenues of $39.5 billion, with profits of $3.7 billion, Oracle is the 107th largest company in the world as of fiscal 2017, according to the Forbes Global 2000. The company had a market capitalization of approximately $191 billion as of mid-2018.

Company History

In the 1970s, Lawrence J. Ellison (Larry Ellison) was inspired by a theoretical paper by Edgar F. Codd on relational databases and attempted to create a system compatible with IBM's System R database.

Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates founded the company Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in June 1977. This is where the first version of the database system was created, which was named Oracle. The database was developed for the CIA until 1979. The company was renamed in 1979 to Relational Software, Inc. (RSI) and moved to Menlo Park, California. An Oracle database running on a PDP-11 was sold to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The company named the first product version 2, fearing that a version 1 would sell poorly. The company's founder Larry Ellison also chaired the company for a long time until he retired to the board of directors in September 2014.

Oracle V3 for VAX was released in March 1983. The code was rewritten in C. RSI renamed itself Oracle. Oracle V5.1 was released in 1986 and was the first database system to support distributed queries. Oracle went public on March 15, 1986.

1993 saw the release of Oracle's Cooperative Development Environment (CDE) and the introduction of Oracle Industries and Oracle Media Server. Oracle's headquarters moved to Redwood Shores in 1994. The company purchased the DEC Rdb (now Oracle Rdb) database product from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) that same year and continues to develop it today. Oracle Rdb is only executable on OpenVMS (also former DEC product - today Hewlett-Packard). Oracle bought 1995 for 100 million US dollar the OLAP product line (Express Server) of the Information Resources Inc. (IRI).

In September 2005, Oracle announced the acquisition of Siebel Systems, the leading provider of standard customer management software, for approximately $5.85 billion. The takeover of Siebel Systems and its 5500 employees took place at the beginning of 2006. At the beginning of November 2006, Oracle announced the acquisition of Stellent, a leading manufacturer of content management system software.

The largest acquisition to date in the business intelligence market occurred in March 2007, when Oracle bought Hyperion for $3.3 billion. At the same time, the company filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against longtime rival SAP for copyright infringement.

Further acquisitions followed. In May 2007 Oracle acquired the US company Agile Software Corporation for $495 million (€366 million), in December 2007 Moniforce and in January 2008 BEA Systems for $8.5 billion (€5.71 billion). In October 2008, Oracle acquired Primavera Systems Inc, a provider of project portfolio management (PPM) solutions.

On April 20, 2009, Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. The US Department of Justice approved the takeover in August 2009 without restrictions. The EU Commission also approved the acquisition by Oracle on January 21, 2010 without conditions.

On July 23, 2009, Oracle acquired GoldenGate Software Inc, a provider of real-time data integration solutions. The acquisition is expected to improve the ability to maintain mission-critical applications during upgrades and migrations.

On September 29, 2009, Oracle acquired HyperRoll Inc, a provider of financial reporting solutions. Oracle now owns HyperRoll's Data Performance Management Suite, which enables the rapid creation of financial reports.

On January 4, 2010, Oracle acquired Silver Creek Systems Inc, a specialist in data quality assurance systems. With Silver Creek's software, Oracle aims to improve product data quality in its enterprise applications and make it possible to manage product data across different industries.

On February 8, 2010 Oracle acquired the company AmberPoint. AmberPoint is an SOA and software specialist that counts companies such as Reuters, Bell, Motorola and Best Buy among its customers. Oracle plans to further expand its Fusion middleware through the takeover.

On February 10, 2010, Oracle acquired Convergin, a provider of J2EE-based real-time switching solutions and network integration software for the communications industry. The integration of Convergin's products into Oracle's communications portfolio is intended to support customers on the path to perfect IP networks and to drive the development of next-generation pre-paid and value-added services.

On April 16, 2010, Oracle acquired Phase Forward, a company specializing in healthcare software. Among other things, hospitals use SaaS products from the US provider for the management of patient data.

On November 2, 2010, Oracle announced the acquisition of Art Technology Group, a company specializing in e-commerce. On November 23, 2010, Oracle won $1.3 billion by suing SAP - the largest software piracy verdict in history.

On March 24, 2011, Oracle announced that fiscal 2011 3.Q total GAAP revenue increased 37% to $8.8 billion, while non-GAAP total revenue increased 36% to $8.8 billion. In October 2011, Oracle Corporations: acquired RightNow Technologies Inc. for $1.5 billion for stronger cloud services.

On February 9, 2012, Oracle announced the acquisition of Taleo for $1.9 billion - to add talent management products and services. On May 23, 2012, Oracle announced the acquisition of social marketing platform Vitrue, for $300 million. On July 10, 2012, Oracle announced the acquisition of social marketer Involver.

On 4 February 2013, Oracle announced that it had agreed to buy Acme Packet. On 25 March 2013, Oracle announced that it had agreed to buy Tekelec. On May 2, 2013, Oracle entered into an agreement with Paradox Engineering to work on new solutions in the smart city market. On 9 May 2013, Oracle announced new in-memory applications for Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle PeopleSoft, Oracle Siebel, Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Hyperion.

In June 2014, Oracle announced that it would acquire Micros Systems for around USD 5 billion. In December 2014, it became known that Oracle intends to cut around 170 jobs in IT support at its German headquarters in Munich. That would be almost eight percent of the total of more than 2200 employees in Germany. The tasks are to be outsourced to Romania.

Since June 2017, Kenneth Johansen has been responsible for Oracle's German business as Head of Technology Sales and Country Leader.

On October 18, 2019, Co-CEO Mark Hurd passed away, having retired from operations shortly before due to an illness. Co-CEO Safra Catz and Larry Ellison as founder, CTO and chairman of the board of directors have taken over until a new CEO is named. Internal candidates were initially named for the possible successor, but a decision has yet to be made.

In December 2020, Ellison moved the company's headquarters from Redwood City, California, to Austin, Texas.

Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores

Product strategy of the company

The vendor's product list is very long due to acquisitions of PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and others.

Oracle is currently trying to gain a foothold with its E-Business Suite and Collaboration Suite in the area of ERP software and groupware, respectively, in which SAP (SAP ERP, R/3), Microsoft and IBM (Lotus) are already established. Furthermore, Oracle is positioning itself with the Oracle Application Server or Oracle WebLogic and numerous additional products against IBM WebSphere and SAP NetWeaver in the JEE area. An expansion of the business field seems necessary because the market for relational databases appears to be largely exhausted.

Oracle acquired its long-time rival PeopleSoft in a hostile takeover for $10.3 billion on December 13, 2004, strengthening its standard business software division. Despite the acquisition, Oracle is still behind rival SAP in this area (22% market share, as of 2004) (40% market share, as of 2004). It is currently still open whether Oracle can successfully merge the four similar products (Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards Enterprise One, JD Edwards World) into one product. Under the name "Fusion", work has begun on an overarching product platform that is intended to unite these offerings. This "Fusion Application Suite" is expected to be available on the market in 2008.

On September 12, 2005, Oracle announced that it would acquire CRM vendor Siebel Systems for $5.85 billion. The acquisition was completed in the first quarter of 2006.

In October 2005 Oracle introduced a database version free of charge for private and commercial use under the name "10g Express Edition".

In February 2006, acquisition bids to open source companies JBoss and MySQL were announced, and after JBoss was bought by Red Hat, Oracle is now considering releasing its own Redhat-derived distribution as a certified base for database servers. This move came with the announcement of Oracle Unbreakable Linux at Oracle Openworld in October 2006.

Ellison rejected a possible takeover of Novell, the owner of Suse Linux, because this would put Oracle "in a very unfavorable situation in the event of a takeover" due to the intertwining of Novell with IBM. Since 2006, Oracle has instead been offering its own Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux under the name Oracle Linux.

With the takeover of Sun Microsystems, Oracle is expanding its product portfolio to include server hardware (SPARC and Sun servers, SPARC processor (M7), memory) in addition to Java, the Unix operating system Solaris, Linux technology, development tools and an open source database, making the company a full-range supplier. The company wants to follow the successes of Apple and Cisco. In addition, Oracle could also develop into a serious competitor to industry giants such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard as a result of this strategic realignment. In January 2010, the EU Commission approved the takeover for USD 7.4 billion without conditions. The acquisition of Sun was completed on January 27, 2010.

The communities of some open source projects that had previously been funded by Sun formed forks in 2011 to be independent of Oracle. These include the office suite LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice.org) and the continuous integration server Jenkins (formerly Hudson).