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due to his interest in yachting and yacht racing. He was also famous for his strong
opinions, one of which was a dislike for Microsoft. Ellison was reported to be the
highest-paid CEO of any U.S. company and not just in software. This is another
example of software creating vast wealth. Oracle annual sales are in the $10 billi-
on range.
There were many competitors in both the database and ERP domains, such as
Informix and Sybase. A major ERP competitor was the German company SAP.
Oracle filed a software piracy and copyright violation lawsuit against SAP. In
2010, Oracle was awarded a total of $1.3 billion by the court. This was the largest
copyright award of any lawsuit. Needless to say, there was an appeal and more
legal wrangling. As of 2012, the award was reduced to around $272 million, but it
is uncertain whether there will be further suits or changes in the amount.
Oracle grew by acquisition as well as by its own development efforts. Some of
the famous companies and products now under the Oracle umbrella include Sun
Microsystems, the famous Java programming language, and the Open Office suite
that competes against Microsoft Office but is free to users. Oracle also acquired
Siebel, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft.
Oracle has become sort of a software conglomerate with database packages,
ERP, business tools, development tools, and several other kinds of software pack-
ages.
Price Systems
Price Systems designs and builds parametric hardware and software cost-estimat-
ing tools, primarily for military and defense software applications. It was founded
as a division within the RCA Corporation in 1975 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
Frank Freiman was the original founder and one of the developers of the
initial estimation tools together with Robert Park. The current president is Tony
DeMarco, also a pioneer in software cost estimation.
When RCA began its withdrawal from the computer business, Price became
an independent company. Later, in 1998, there was a management buyout, which
moved the company to Mount Laurel, New Jersey. The management team in-
cluded Anthony DeMarco, Bruce Fad, Earl King, and George Teologlou.
Because the military and defense communities often build large software ap-
plications with more than 10,000 function points or 1,000,000 lines of code, para-
metric estimation is often used. (A study that I conducted found that the accuracy
of manual estimates became progressively worse with application size and was al-
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