Oracle Aged 35: Milestones in the Growth of the World’s First RDBMS Company

By Chris Preimesberger | eWeek.com

Oracle turned 35 on June 16, and it has been among the sales leaders in enterprise IT for most of those years. When the company went public in 1986, it had 450 employees and annual revenue of $55 million. Twenty-six years later, Oracle has a market cap of $135 billion, a global full-time workforce of 108,000 and annual revenue of $37 billion.

Those numbers say a lot. Perhaps Bruce Scott, co-architect and co-author of the first three versions of Oracle Database, explains Oracle’s success succinctly with a simple story about its co-founder and CEO, Larry Ellison. “I’ve thought a lot about why Oracle was successful,” Scott said. “I really think that it was Larry Ellison. There were a lot of other databases out there that we beat. It was really Larry’s charisma, vision and his determination to make this thing work no matter what. It’s just the way Larry thinks. I can give you an example of his thought processes: We had space allocated to us, and we needed to get our terminals strung to the computer room next door. We didn’t have anywhere to really string the wiring. Larry picks up a hammer, crashes a hole in the middle of the wall, and says, ‘There you go.’ It’s just the way he thinks—make a hole—make it happen somehow.”

Click the link to see a slide show entitled “16 Milestones in the Growth of the World’s First RDBMS Company”, which illustrates the path of Oracle’s development during the past third of a century.