Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL), one of the major companies developing database management systems, tools for database development, and enterprise resource planning software, customer relationship management software (CRM) and supply chain planning (SCM) software dates from 1977 and has offices in more than 145 countries around the world. As of 2005, it employs over 50,000 worldwide.

Lawrence J. Ellison (Larry Ellison) has served as Oracle's CEO for several years. Ellison served as the chairman of the board until his replacement by Jeff Henley in 2004. Ellison retains his role as CEO. Forbes magazine once judged Ellison the richest man in the world.

Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems named A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. He had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to be compatible with it, but IBM stopped this by keeping the error codes for their DBMS secret. He founded Oracle in 1977 under the name Software Development Laboratories. In 1979 SDL changed its name to Relational Software, Inc. (RSI). In 1983, RSI was renamed Oracle Corporation to more closely align itself with its flagship product Oracle database with Howard Johns as senior programmer.