Oracle Corporation

What Oracle is

Oracle Corporation is an American software company that sells database software, enterprise applications, and cloud infrastructure and hardware^[1]. It is headquartered in Austin, Texas^[1], and Larry Ellison, one of its co-founders, is chairman of the board and chief technology officer^[1].

The company's products sit underneath the everyday operations of large organisations: the systems that hold customer records, order histories, payroll and financial ledgers, and the machines those systems run on.

Where it came from

Oracle was founded on 16 June 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Bob Miner, Ed Oates and Larry Ellison, under the name Software Development Laboratories^[1]. Its founding product grew out of an idea Ellison took from Edgar F. Codd's 1970 paper on relational database management systems^[1].

Codd's relational model stores data in tables of rows and columns and lets a user ask questions about those tables with a declarative query language, instead of writing code that walks through the data structure by hand. The practical consequence is that a new question can be put to an existing database without redesigning how the data is stored, which is why relational systems came to replace earlier ways of organising business records.

The company took the name Oracle from the codename of a 1977 CIA project that was its first customer. It was renamed Relational Software in 1979 and Oracle Systems Corporation in 1983^[1].

What it sells

Alongside its database software, Oracle sells enterprise applications. Its core application software includes suites for enterprise resource planning, human capital management, customer experience and supply chain management^[1]. Such suites are meant to give one organisation a single shared record of its money, its people, its customers and its goods, so that separate departments stop keeping private versions of the same numbers. Oracle also sells cloud infrastructure and hardware^[1] — the computing and storage that these systems run on, whether a customer operates them in its own data centres or rents capacity from Oracle.

Where it stands

Oracle ranks among the 50 largest companies in the world by market capitalisation and was 52nd on the Forbes Global 2000 as of 2026^[1]. On 10 September 2025 the company disclosed about $317 billion in remaining performance obligations, most of which came from its cloud agreement with OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter^[2][3]. Remaining performance obligations are contracted work that has been signed but not yet delivered and billed; the figure is therefore a measure of business already booked rather than revenue already earned. The surge in Oracle's share price around that disclosure increased chairman Larry Ellison's wealth by roughly $100 billion in a single day^[2].

That moment marks a shift in how the company is understood. For decades Oracle was chiefly the vendor of the database that large institutions kept their records in; the cloud contracts that dominated its 2025 news made it, in the eyes of the market, a supplier of the computing capacity that AI systems are trained and served on.