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Oracle is a California-based cloud technology company that develops services and products for computing infrastructure and software. It was founded in 1977 under the name Software Development Laboratories, and its flagship product was the Oracle Database. Its database and cloud computing products are used by governments and in the science and medical fields. They have also been used in the nonprofit, finance, construction and engineering, and healthcare sectors.
Oracles specializes in developing and selling computer hardware, database management software, cloud services, and other enterprise software products. For hardware, Oracle designs and manufactures servers, storage systems, networking equipment, and other hardware products. For software, Oracle's products include its flagship database management system and various other applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), human capital management (HCM), and supply chain management (SCM).
For cloud services, Oracle has been building out compute, storage, networking, database, analytics, and application development services that target specific vertical markets. Oracle licenses its software products under a proprietary licensing model that allows customers to use software for a given period of time while paying for ongoing support and maintenance.
As a publicly traded company, the ownership of Oracle has diversified over its history. However, cofounder Larry Ellison remains the majority shareholder of the company, maintaining an approximate 42 percent share of the company. Other major shareholders include The Vanguard Group, Geode Capital Management, JPMorgan Investment Management, Fidelity Management & Research Co., and Norges Bank Investment Management.
The company was founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates. Ellison and Miner previously worked as computer programmers at the Ampex Corporation, while Oates was Ellison's supervisor at Ampex. The trio were reportedly inspired by a research paper on relational database models in which they saw commercial potential. The research paper was written by British-born computer scientist Edgar F. Codd for a relational database model published in the IBM Research Journal. The described approach offered an organizational schema for large amounts of data that allowed for efficient storage and quick retrieval, which they would develop and release in 1979.
This product was known as the Oracle v2 (even though it was the first release) and is considered the earliest commercially available relational database program to use Structured Query Language (SQL), and it would prove popular. It would originally be written in assembly language running on PDP-11 under RSX-11 with 128 kilobytes of memory. Oracle would beat IBM to market with its relational database using SQL by close to two years.
Oracle, throughout its history, earned a reputation for aggressive marketing, including the 1982 renaming to Oracle Systems Corporation following the success of its flagship product; it was eventually renamed Oracle Corporation in 1995. Previous to this, the company had been renamed to Relational Systems Inc (RSI) before settling on the Oracle name. The change to the Oracle name also drew inspiration from a 1977 CIA project codename, which also happened to be the company's first customer. At the time, the CIA needed a database and wanted a relational database.
In 1986, Oracle went public. The company's initial public offering (IPO) saw Oracle put 2.1 million shares up for sale on March 12, 1986, at $15 each on the Nasdaq under the symbol ORCL. The company's stock price remained relatively stable until 2000, during which period it broke $40 dollars a share before collapsing to $10 a share. After that point, the company's share price began a steady share price climb, which saw it reach a new high in September of 2023 of $127.54 a share.
Within a year of the company's IPO, Oracle was considered the largest database vendor, already providing its products to more than 4,500 customers in 55 countries and with total sales exceeding $100 million. In 1989, the company appeared in the S&P 500 Index, and the company moved its headquarters to Redwood Shores, California.
The 1990s proved to be an important decade for Oracle. The company, in 1995, began to promote its products on the internet while promoting a strategy to connect all of its products to the internet. At the same time, the Oracle Database was recognized as one of the most important products of the 1990s, but the company faced difficulties.
The company faced increasing competition in the database technology market, which, along with an investment and vocal support for the network computer (a computer platform that was not as fully equipped as a standard personal computer and relied on servers for data and software) led to the company stumbling. Further, with lawsuits compounding these conditions, Oracle was on the brink of bankruptcy.
By 1998, Oracle released Oracle Applications 2, and in April of that year, announced they integrated a Java Virtual Machine with the Oracle Database. Further, the year saw Oracle release Oracle 8i (where "i" stands for internet) and the Oracle 8 and Oracle Application Server 4.0 for the Linux platform. While in 1999, Oracle offered its first DMBS with XML support.
The company's bet on the internet would pan out better than its bet on the Network Computer. Oracle's early embrace of the internet and its development of products more compatible with the World Wide Web technologies helped the company grow. Similarly, as the company grew, Oracle began to acquire other companies and those companies' software and technology applications. For example, some of the high-profile acquisitions, including PeopleSoft, acquired in 2005; Siebel, acquired in 2006; BEA, acquired in 2008; Sun Microsystems, acquired in 2010; and NetSuite, acquired in 2016.
The 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the largest manufacturer of servers and workstations, helped Oracle refresh its product line with an extensive list of server hardware and software systems. Further, it gave Oracle control of key technologies, including the Java programming language and MySQL.
By 2013, Oracle released the "12c" database, where the "c" represents "cloud," and began the company's shift towards cloud-based technology embodied in the 2016 release of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. This platform offered a fully integrated cloud offering, providing users with business applications on the platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) models. In 2013, Oracle transferred the company's stock listing from the Nasdaq to the NYSE, which at the time of the transfer, was the largest U.S. market transfer.
Oracle continued the company's acquisitions, including acquiring companies developing technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT) to continue to push the company's platform and offerings forward. This included a 2019 partnership with former rival Microsoft, which worked to allow customers to directly connect the Oracle Cloud with Microsoft Azure, store data on both cloud computing platforms, and run software on either Oracle or Azure. This partnership was to help Oracle compete against Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as Google and Salesforce.
The company also opened the decade with a move of the company's head office from Redwood City, California, to Austin, Texas.
In 2022, Oracle faced a privacy class action lawsuit in the U.S. which, in a sixty-six-page complaint, alleged Oracle used a "worldwide surveillance machine" that amassed details on some five billion people, which, the suit further alleged, allowed the company to generate revenue of over $40 billion a year from the data. The suit's claim is supposed to be backed by a video of then-CEO Larry Ellison describing the company's real-time learning system collects and confirms information on the 5 billion profiles stored in the "Oracle Data Cloud." In 2023, a California federal judge dismissed three claims considered light on specific allegations and trimmed a fourth without prejudice in the case, allowing the suit to continue.
In 2023, Oracle also announced a $1.5 billion investment in Saudi Arabia, including opening a data center in the Riyadh region to build the company's cloud footprint in the kingdom and open the company's third public cloud region. Oracle joined other international companies that moved their regional headquarters to Riyahd and invested in the region to benefit from government contracts.
The company has infrastructure products that have various applications. Its cloud infrastructure offers computing, storage, networking, analytics, application development, content management, and more. Oracle's products can be used in multiple applications, such as enterprise resource planning and human capital management. The products have been used by companies such as Citi and Panasonic.
The Oracle Database was built to be a relational database and was the original product the company started with. As a relational database, the Oracle Database is an information system with a formal system for storing and processing information, similar to a set of cardboard boxes containing manila folders with rules for how to store and retrieve those folders, except it is organized as a digital information database. The purpose of the database remains the same, including to collect, store, and retrieve related information for use by database applications.
The Oracle Database, as the original product, was first released in 1979 as Oracle v2 (version 2) as the first commercially available SQL-based relational database management system (RDBMS). The first portable version of the Oracle Database—Oracle Version 3—was released in 1983 and was the first relational database to run on mainframes, minicomputers, and personal computers. This version of the database was written in the C programming language, which allowed it to be ported to multiple platforms.
As the company continued to develop the database, it introduced version 4 in 1985, which offered multiversion read consistency, while version 6 introduced enhancements to disk I/O, row locking, scalability, and backup and recovery. Version 6 was also the first version to introduce the Pl/SQL language. Oracle Database version 7 was released in 1992 with new stored procedures and triggers. Oracle8 was released in 1997 with added support for new data types. Perhaps one of the larger developments for the Oracle Database was Oracle8i, released in 1999, which provided native support for internet protocols and server-side support for the Java programming language. This was the first version of the Oracle database designed for internet computing that enabled the database to be deployed in a multitier environment.
In 2001, Oracle introduced the Oracle9i Database, which included Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), which enabled multiple instances to access a single database simultaneously. The Oracle Database 10g introduced grid computing in 2003, which enabled organizations to virtualize computing resources through the grid infrastructure based on low-cost commodity servers. The 2007 release of the Oracle Database 11g introduced new features that enabled administrators and developers to adapt to changing business requirements.
Released in 2013, Oracle Database 12c was the first Oracle Database developed for cloud computing, featuring a multitenant architecture, in-memory column store (IM column store), and support for JSON documents. The Oracle Database 18c further worked to simplify integration with directory services and introduce functions such as exploit memory for columnar data models. With Oracle Database 19c was a long-support version of the Oracle Database 12c with a focus on stability and improvement to other features.
Its most updated database is its Oracle Database 21c, which provides database management, security, and other services. Its autonomous database provides services such as a data warehouse, transaction processing, and a JSON database. The Oracle Database 21c also offers capabilities such as improved multimodal support through in-database Javascript and native blockchain tables, and multiworkload improvements, including AutoML and sharding enhancements.
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a set of complementary cloud services that are developed to allow users to enable the building and running of a range of applications and services in a hosted environment. The OCI is built to provide users with computer capabilities and storage capacity in a flexible overlay virtual network built to be accessible and secure from an on-premise network.
OCI is offered as a distributed cloud that can be deployed and accessed as and where users need it. This includes in multicloud arrangements where Oracle offers direct database integration with Microsoft Azure; a public cloud arrangement where commercial and government public clouds can be accessed with a consistent set of services; a hybrid cloud arrangement, where secured cloud access can be had for nearly any location, while database-as-a-service can be deployed in specific locations; and a dedicated cloud arrangement where users receive cloud services within a users data center.
OCI Features
Oracle offers users the necessary attestations and controls to ensure its cloud instance and its use of a cloud remain compliant depending on the industry requirements. Oracle offers users the tools to manage security and privacy while also working to ensure that Oracle does its part in the shared responsibility which occurs in a cloud-computing environment. This includes giving users an understanding of which Oracle cloud services meet the necessary legal and regulatory compliance obligations to help users make decisions about their deployment.
Oracle offers a suite of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that offer users consistent processes and a single source of truth for business applications. These applications include enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, human capital management, and advertising and customer experience.
Oracle offers an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application that is intended to allow users to predict, detect, and act on new situations, such as large deltas between forecasts and actuals, while also offering machine learning to reveal hidden bias, uncover deviations, and reduce those deltas; offers automation to eliminate manual business processes, including in the preparation of narratives or assessing potential merger and acquisition activity; offer AI-powered digital assistant to help simplify and speed common tasks; and to help users build and launch new business models in real time to better refine a business's approach.
Oracle is developing a supply chain management (SCM) and manufacturing application to help organizations respond to changing demand, supply, and market conditions. The application offers users tools to help with supply chain planning, including planning for demand, supply, order fulfillment, and production across a supply chain; for inventory management to help users optimize inventory levels; an integrated manufacturing execution system (MES); an order management tool to increase visibility and coordination across channels and fulfillment sources; a product lifecycle management tool to help time to market, reduce costs, and improve product quality; and blockchain and Iot tools to help connect operational, customer, product, and machine data for issue detection, multi-tier visibility, and other insights across the supply network.
The Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) application is a cloud solution that works to connect human resource processes and the people they oversee across an enterprise. This is intended to create a more efficient process around managing human resources by offering a single data source for all decisions around employees and their work experiences; help users attract talent and improve hiring decisions with end-to-end talent management tools; help users reduce compliance risks, deploy workforces with greater control, and offer an integrated solution that links time, labor, and leave management with payroll, financial, and personal data; and deliver pre-built and customizable analytics to monitor, align, and act on workforce insights.
The Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) application is built to offer a suite of applications that goes beyond a traditional customer relation management (CRM) tool to help users with their customer relationships, including a complete view of every interaction a customer goes on, from acquisition to retention, to help organizations control that journey. The features of the application include the following:
- advertising tools to help users increase advertising performance and drive outcomes through targeting data, contextual technology, and measurement solutions
- the ability to create data-powered marketing experiences to increase campaign engagement
- responsive sales touchpoints to connect customers to sales teams
- service portals to help users automate workflows for customer self-service, agent-assisted service, and field service engagements
- a CX platform where users can connect data, processes, and applications on a unified platform capable of being integrated with other applications used by an enterprise
Oracle has integrated artificial intelligence (AI) throughout the company's offerings to increase automation and provide users with ease of use across their cloud infrastructure and applications, including using machine learning and AI to connect data across an enterprise and offer a single source of data truth. In 2023, however, the company extended its AI suite to include generative AI-powered assistants. The first included generative AI systems for business data analysts, allowing those analysts to ask the assistant questions about their data, helping those analysts to learn from patterns in the data and generate insights they may otherwise not generate.
To build out its generative AI capabilities, Oracle also announced the use of NVIDIA's H100 AI processors in the cloud to keep its AI fast and competitive compared to similar services. These models are trained on the data moved through Oracle's various platforms before they end up where they need to be processed, allowing the AI cluster to train models on the data and for the data to end up where it needs to be for processing. This is intended to improve the models' predictive capabilities in specific fields.
Oracle also offers various on-premise software products, including for programming languages, such as Java, Linux, and MySQL, or for databases, such as the Exadata platform. The company's software-as-a-service (SaaS) products extend to various solutions depending on the needs of an enterprise. These software products are offered on a pay-as-you-go basis to allow businesses to implement software based on their needs without the need to implement one of Oracle's larger platform solutions (through which much of the software is offered).
Oracle's Java is a popular programming language and development platform. For Oracle users, they offer more features than the traditional open-source Java, including a management service and development environments for Java virtual machines. The GraalVM is developed to optimize the performance of Java applications and microservices, either on-premise or in the cloud. Similarly, the enterprise edition of Java offered by Oracle offers Java Card, which is developed to improve the security for Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices, to help users host multiple applications at the edge on resource-constrained devices.
Oracle also offers an enterprise version of Linux. The Oracle distribution offers Linux with the tools necessary to develop, deploy, optimize, and manage applications either in the cloud or at the edge. The Oracle distribution is developed to be secure and easier for users to manage, including tools for automation, virtualization, management, high availability, cloud-native tools, and Kubernetes with various tiers for enterprise users based on their needs.
Offered by Oracle, the enterprise edition of MySQL is developed to offer a set of advanced features, management tools, and technical support to increase the scalability, security, reliability, and uptime of MySQL while reducing the risk, cost, and complexity in developing, deploying, and managing MySQL applications. Some of those features include tools for data encryption, masking and de-identification, authentication, encryption, firewalls, auditing tools, backup, compression, restoration, a backup dashboard, and real-time performance monitoring.
The Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service is offered to enterprises and developers looking to build applications using document, fixed schema, and key-value database models. These models can then be used to deliver predictable, single-digit millisecond response times with data replication for high availability. Other features include compatibility with on-premise NoSQL database, the ability to use modern development languages, integration with development tools, native analytics support, active regional replication, a fully managed cloud service (including serverless with a dedicated environment, instant scaling, and auto-repairing), and the ability to work at scale.
Oracle's hardware offers scalable engineered systems, servers, and storage solutions that can be deployed on-premise, in-cloud, or in a hybrid arrangement. These racks and their software are developed to optimize application and database performance while protecting user data and offering automations.
Oracle offers x86 and SPARC servers, which can run enterprise applications in on-premise data centers and edge environments while engineered to offer high performance, security, reliability, and efficiency. These racks can run Enterprise Java, Oracle Database, and other application workloads with virtualization with the inclusion of an operating system (including Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, or Oracle VM).
Oracle's Exadata is an enterprise database hardware platform that runs Oracle Database workloads. These workloads are developed to be capable of running at any scale while being performative, available, and secure for users. Exadata is designed to employ optimizations that let transaction processing, analytics, machine learning, and mixed workloads at speed and with efficiency. Oracle's Exadata can be used in a cloud structure, or on-premise. For on-premise deployments, Oracle's Exadata works on integrated, full-stack solutions offered by Oracle. The Exadata platform offers up to 1 terabyte per second SQL throughput, with SQL read latency of less than 17 seconds and up to 22.4 million SQL operations per second per rack, whether deployed on-premise or in-cloud.
Oracle offers storage solutions developed for on-premise or in-cloud workloads. These storage solutions can be used with Oracle's Database and Cloud Infrastructure, and are developed to meet customers' storage needs, including with unified file, block, and object storage. The storage solutions come with data protection solutions, up to 8 petabytes of all-flash storage for latency-sensitive operations, up to 18 gigabytes per second throughput for data-warehouse and data-protection workloads, and up to 57 exabytes of uncompressed capacity and 29 petabytes per hour throughput under a single pane of glass management for greater scalability.
The Oracle Engineered Systems are integrated, full-stack solutions developed with Oracle Database and related applications to help customers run their workloads with integrated security, which cannot be achieved with multivendor, on-premise solutions. These solutions are built for on-premise or cloud integrations, with trusted partition licensing to reduce software costs. They offer continuous protection for data on the databases and reliability for edge devices in remote locations. These systems are developed to meet users' needs where they need them as they need them.
Oracle also has an online academy that features courses to learn about how to use Oracle products and the software behind them. Institutions and students can sign up to access the courses. There are also professional certifications that can be earned through the academy, and the company states that they are recognized throughout the industry.