Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing computer hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems. Headquartered at 500 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, Redwood City, California, United States and employing approximately 113,644 people worldwide as of 30 June 2012,it has enlarged its share of the software market through organic growth and through a number of high-profile acquisitions. By 2007 Oracle had the third-largest software revenue, after Microsoft and IBM.The company also builds tools for database development and systems of middle-tier software, enterprise resource planning software (ERP), customer relationship management software (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) software.Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle Corporation, has served as Oracle's CEO throughout its history. He also served as the Chairman of the Board until his replacement by Jeffrey O. Henley in 2004. On August 22, 2008 the Associated Press ranked Ellison as the top-paid chief executive in the world.Ellison took inspiration from the 1970 paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database management systems (RDBMS) named "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." He heard about the IBM System R database from an article in theIBM Research Journal provided by Ed Oates (a future co-founder of Oracle Corporation). System R also derived from Codd's theories, and Ellison wanted to make Oracle's product compatible with System R, but IBM stopped this by keeping the error codes for their DBMS secret. Ellison co-founded Oracle Corporation in 1977 with Bob Miner and Ed Oates under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979 SDL changed its name to Relational Software, Inc. (RSI). In 1982, RSI renamed itself Oracle Systems to align itself more closely with its flagship product Oracle Database. At this stage Bob Miner served as the company's senior programmer. In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation.Part of Oracle Corporation's early success arose from using the C programming language to implement its products. This eased porting to different operating systems (most of which support C). This gave Oracle Corporation an advantage over companies using operating-system-specific languages.Oracle Corporation programmers wrote the first C compiler for the IBM mainframe platform in order to port to that platform.
Net income $ 10.0 billion (2012)
Total assets $ 78.3 billion (2012)