Larry J. Ellison is the co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation, one of the biggest software companies. He was born in 1944 in Bronx, New York and grown up by his adaptive parents. His adaptive father was a real estate businessman and an auditor for the public housing authority. Ellison was a bright but inattentive student. He showed great interest in science and mathematics. He dropped out of University of Illinois at the end of his second year; he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he learned the basics of computer programming.
Ellison switched from job to job, worked as a technician for Fireman’s Fund and Wells Fargo bank for the next eight years. During the 1970s, Ellison joined Ampex Corporation as a programmer. He is an active participant in building the first IBM-compatible mainframe system and one of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named “Oracle”.
In 1977, Ellison with two of his Ampex colleagues, Robert Miner and Ed Oates, founded Oracle Company under the name Software development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979 it was renamed as Relational Software Inc., later renamed Oracle. Ellison served as Chief Executive Officer from the beginning. Ellison inspired by a paper called “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” by Edgar F. Codd, describing a concept Codd had developed at IBM and saw the commercial potential in the concept of a Structured Query Language (SQL).
Until the rise of Microsoft SQL Server in1990s Oracle enjoyed years of industry dominance. IBM’s DB2 is the Oracle’s main competitor for new database licenses on UNIX, Linux, and Windows operating systems, which is still dominating the mainframe database market. In1997 Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs came back to the company. Ellison resigned in 2002. Ellison has received numerous honors and awards and named as the Entrepreneur of the Year from the Harvard School of Business. Mr. Ellison sits on the board of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
After 30 years, the company stood as the world’s second largest independent software company and the world’s leading supplier of software for information management. Almost every Industry is implementing the Oracle technology. Oracle is one of the first companies to make available its business applications through the Internet on its entire product line, which includes database, business applications, and application development and decision support tools.
It has released Oracle Fusion Middleware, which connects all levels of enterprise technology to help customers access the knowledge they need to respond to market conditions with speed and agility. Oracle under Ellision’s innovation and commitment developed Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Grid Computing, support for enterprise Linux, and Oracle Fusion all helping in the success of the company.