Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
One must also mention Oracle Corporation, founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob
Miner and Ed Oates. The firm has long specialized in creating and distributing enterprise
software, especially database management systems, and recently moved into hardware.
Oracle went public in 1986 with revenues of $55 million. At the end of 2006, Oracle
boasted the world's third-largest software revenue, trailing only Microsoft and IBM. Best
known for its
Oracle Database
, the firm also concentrates on middle-tier software, enter-
prise resource planning (ERP), and CRM and SCM software. Larry Ellison has remained
at the firm's helm all these years, serving as CEO up to the present writing and, until 2006,
as Chairman of the Board.
"I've run engineering since day one at Oracle, and I still run engineering," Ellison told
an interviewer in 2006. "I hold meetings every week with the database team, the middle-
ware team, the applications team. I run engineering, and I will do that until the board throws
me out of there. I'm also involved with all of the acquisitions and overall strategy. Now it's
true, I don't run operations. But I've never really run operations. I've never had the endur-
ance to run sales. The whole idea of selling to the customer just isn't my personality. I'm an
engineer - tell me why something isn't working or is, and I'm curious."
In the first decade of this century, Ellison launched a strenuous program of strategic
acquisitions. "The company is already dominating the market in database software," com-
mented a journalist in 2006, "and Ellison is determined to beat his rivals in applications and
middleware: the software that sits between a computer's operating system (such as Win-
dows) and its applications (such as
Word
). To do this he has embarked upon an extraordin-
arily ambitious shopping spree, spending close to $20 billion dollars on 21 companies over
the past 18 months. Some acquisitions have been land grabs, such as the hostile takeover of
PeopleSoft or the friendlier purchase of Siebel. Others were for particular technologies and
engineers. And Ellison's voracious appetite continues unabated. At the moment he is look-
ing to buy industry specific software to overtake Oracle's greatest rival, Germany's SAP, in
applications. Speculation is rife as to his next target."
Eventually, in 2009, Ellison would surprise virtually everyone in Silicon Valley when
he expanded from the high-margin software business and entered the low-margin hardware
market by acquiring computer maker Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion.
Founded in 1982 by Bill Joy, Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim,
Sun Microsystems created computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC
(Scalable Processor Architecture) processors as well Opteron processors (from Advanced
Micro Systems [AMD]) and Intel's Xeon processors. The firm also developed and sold stor-
age systems along with a suite of software products including the Solaris operating system,
developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Oth-
er Sun technologies included the Java platform,
MySQL
(Structured Query Language), and
NFS (Network File System). Sun was an active proponent of open systems in general and
UNIX in particular, and a major contributor to the open source software movement. (Note:
