Oracle Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in Santa Clara, California, in 1977 by Bob Miner, Ed Oates, and current chairman of the board and chief technology officer Larry Ellison, Oracle is among the 50 largest companies in the world by market cap, and ranked 52nd on the Forbes Global 2000 as of 2026.

The company sells database software (particularly the Oracle Database), enterprise applications, and cloud infrastructure and hardware. Oracle's core application software is a suite of enterprise software products, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), customer experience (CX) and supply chain management (SCM) software.

History

Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates co-founded Oracle on June 16, 1977, in Santa Clara, California, as Software Development Laboratories (SDL). Beginning as consultants with a background in large-scale memory after a project for Ampex, 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 an IBM research journal provided by Oates. Ellison wanted to make Oracle's product compatible with System R, but failed to do so as IBM kept the error codes for its DBMS a secret. SDL changed its name to Relational Software, Inc (RSI) in 1979, then again to Oracle Systems Corporation in 1983, to align itself more closely with its flagship product Oracle Database. The name also drew from the codename of a 1977 project for the Central Intelligence Agency, Oracle's first customer; the company received permission to use the code name for the new product. (According to Oracle executive Mike Humphries, Miner told him that the new company had the choice of the CIA database project or another offer to develop a compiler for the PDP-4, and the founders flipped a coin to decide.)

Miner served as a senior programmer, and Oates also worked in development. The three founders decided that Ellison was the worst programmer so he became the salesman. Understanding both customers and technology, Ellison designed database tables that he used to demonstrate the power of SQL to customers. By February 1983 the Rosen Electronics Letter said that Oracle was "the most comprehensive offering we've seen" among databases, with good marketing and a substantial installed base encouraging developers to write software for it. The newsletter said that revenue in fiscal 1983 would be about $8 million and would double in 1984. On March 12, 1986, the company had its initial public offering. In 1989, Oracle moved its world headquarters to the Redwood Shores neighborhood of Redwood City, California, though its campus was not completed until 1995. The company hired so many from top universities that Humphries compared it to "Cargill buying crops". Some new employees worked as receptionists or distributed coffee until more suitable positions became available.

Oracle in the late 1980s began selling enterprise software running on the database, starting with financial software, then manufacturing. Many at Oracle wanted to discontinue applications; the first several versions were weak, they competed with the company's independent software vendors and value-added reseller partners, and applications were never profitable for Oracle until after 2000. Selling them (and acquiring vendors such as JD Edwards and PeopleSoft, the latter being the second hostile takeover in the history of software) nonetheless allowed Oracle to compete with SAP; by the mid-2000s it was the world's largest enterprise software vendor. The company's Ken Jacobs later said:

In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation, officially named Oracle, but is sometimes referred to as Oracle Corporation, the name of the holding company.Frequently Asked Questions | Investor Relations. Oracle. Retrieved July 14, 2013.

In 2010, Oracle launched Fusion Applications to unify the features and technologies of acquisitions PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and JD Edwards, into a single suite.

On July 15, 2013, Oracle transferred its stock listing from Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange. At the time, it was the largest-ever U.S. market transfer.

In 2018, Oracle opened a new office in the neighboorhod of East Riverside in southeast Austin, Texas. In December 2020, Oracle announced that it was moving its world headquarters from Redwood Shores to Austin, Texas.

In an effort to compete with Amazon Web Services and its products, Oracle announced in 2019 it was partnering with former rival Microsoft. The alliance claimed that Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure would be directly connected, allowing customers of each to store data on both cloud computing platforms and run software on either Oracle or Azure. Some saw this not only as an attempt to compete with Amazon but also with Google and Salesforce, which acquired Looker and Tableau Software, respectively. In 2023, Oracle and Microsoft expanded their partnership to deliver Oracle database services on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure running inside Microsoft Azure.

A year later, Oracle announced similar partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, making the Oracle database available in all four major hyperscaler providers.

In December 2021, Oracle announced the acquisition of Cerner, a health information technology company. The acquisition of Cerner was completed on June 8, 2022, for US$28.3 billion in cash. Also in December 2021, Oracle announced the acquisition of Federos, an artificial intelligence (AI) and automation tools company for network performance.

In February 2023, the company announced it was going to invest $1.5 billion into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including opening a data center in the country's capital, Riyadh.

In April 2024, Oracle announced it was moving its world headquarters from Austin to a new complex in Nashville, Tennessee. No timeframe was given.

In June 2024, Oracle announced a $1 billion investment in Spain to enhance artificial intelligence and cloud computing. This investment will create a new cloud region in Madrid in partnership with Telefónica. The goal is to help Spanish businesses and the public sector with digital transformation and to meet European Union regulations. The same year, the company announced investments in Japan and Malaysia for US$8 billion and US$6.5 billion, respectively.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump announced Stargate, a joint venture by Oracle, OpenAI, SoftBank and investment firm MGX to invest $500 billion over four years in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US. Also in 2025, the company announced additional investments in the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands for US$5 billion and US$3 billion, respectively.

In September 2025, Oracle announced it was promoting Clay Magouyrk, president of cloud infrastructure, and Mike Sicilia, president of industries, to become co-CEOs. They replaced Safra Catz, who held the position for 11 years, and transitioned to a new role as executive vice chair.

In January 2026, social media platform TikTok announced it finalized a deal to change ownership of its U.S. operations, with Oracle, MGX and private equity firm Silver Lake each owning a 15% stake in the venture, while ByteDance retained a 19.9% stake. As of March 2026, Oracle's TikTok stake was worth an estimated ~$2B.

In March 2026, Oracle signed a voluntary "ratepayer protection pledge" where companies pledge to build or buy energy needed to power data centers at a different rate to regular consumers, allowing them to keep utility bills down substantially.

In April 2026, it was reported that Oracle laid off nearly 12,000 staff in India, according to the impacted employees. The company was believed to be planning another mass layoff round within a month.

In May 2026, Oracle reported that it employed 141,000 full-time workers, down from 162,000 a year earlier, according to its annual regulatory filing. The decline represented a reduction of approximately 21,000 employees, or nearly 13% of its workforce, amid broader layoffs across the technology sector as companies increased investments in artificial intelligence.

For the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 (ending November 2025), Oracle reported total revenue of $14.1 billion, with cloud infrastructure (IaaS) revenue growing 68% year-over-year to $4.1 billion. Total remaining performance obligations surged to $130 billion, reflecting strong demand for AI infrastructure capacity.

Products and services Oracle provides cloud infrastructure, AI services, database and database management software, enterprise applications, analytics, and developer tools that help businesses manage their data, operations, and IT environments.

Software applications Oracle provides software applications, such as integrated enterprise software applications, Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, human capital management (HCM), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM).

Databases The Oracle Database was released in 2004 as 10g. Subsequently, the product was released several times, with the newest issue released as 12c in 2018. Oracle released its Autonomous Database in 2018, Oracle Database 23ai in 2024, and issued its newest release Oracle AI Database 26ai in 2025.

Additionally, Oracle Corporation acquired and developed the following additional database technologies: Berkeley DB, which offers embedded database processing Oracle Rdb, a relational database system running on OpenVMS platforms. Oracle acquired Rdb in 1994 from Digital Equipment Corporation. Oracle has since made many enhancements to this product and development continues . TimesTen, which features in-memory database operations Oracle Essbase, which continues the Hyperion Essbase tradition of multi-dimensional database management MySQL, a relational database management system licensed under the GNU General Public License, initially developed by MySQL AB Oracle NoSQL Database, a scalable, distributed key-value NoSQL database

Data centers In March 2026, Oracle announced plans to build 72 multicloud data centers embedded with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google clouds. At the same time, Oracle had more than 200 live or in-progress cloud regions throughout the world—more than any of its competitors. The multicloud database side of the business grew 817% in Q2 of fiscal year 2026.

Oracle’s data center expansion has drawn opposition from some residents and environmental groups over concerns about water consumption, energy demand, air quality, and the effects of large-scale construction on surrounding communities. Such concerns have emerged around projects including the planned Project Jupiter campus in southern New Mexico, where critics have questioned the development’s water and power requirements and its potential effects on local resources.

Oracle and its development partners have announced measures intended to reduce the environmental impact of new data centers. The planned Port Washington, Wisconsin, campus is expected to use closed-loop liquid cooling, match non-renewable energy consumption with renewable-energy purchases, and pursue LEED certification. Project Jupiter’s developers replaced plans for gas turbines and diesel generators with solid oxide fuel cells and have said the campus will use recycled, non-potable water to reduce freshwater consumption.

Middleware

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a family of middleware software products, including application server, system integration, business process management (BPM), user interaction, content management, identity management and business intelligence (BI) products.

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search