Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas, United States. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells database software and technology (particularly its own brands), cloud engineered systems, and enterprise software products, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, human capital management (HCM) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software (also known as customer experience), enterprise performance management (EPM) software, and supply chain management (SCM) software.
Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle Corporation in 1977 with Bob Miner and Ed Oates under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). Ellison took inspiration from the 1970 paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database management systems (RDBMS) named "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." He heard about the IBM System R database from an article in the IBM Research Journal provided by Oates. Ellison wanted to make Oracle's product compatible with System R, but failed to do so as IBM kept the error codes for their DBMS a secret. SDL changed its name to Relational Software, Inc (RSI) in 1979, then again to Oracle Systems Corporation in 1983, to align itself more closely with its flagship product Oracle Database. The name also drew from the 1977 CIA project codename, which was also Oracle's first customer. At this stage, Bob Miner served as the company's senior programmer. On March 12, 1986, the company had its initial public offering.
In 1989, Oracle moved its world headquarters to the Redwood Shores neighborhood of Redwood City, California, though its campus was not completed until 1995.
In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation, officially named Oracle, but is sometimes referred to as Oracle Corporation, the name of the holding company. Part of Oracle Corporation's early success arose from using the C programming language to implement its products.