by Gerald Boerner
Larry Ellison is another of the young firebrands, along with Scott McNealy and Steve Jobs, who came onto the technology scene in the 1970s. All three saw their solution to the need of computing power differently. Larry Ellison saw the database management system as the key to storing and retrieving large volumes of data from computers, especially large mainframes and powerful systems like Sun Microcomputer servers. His founding of the Oracle Corporation led it recently to take over Sun Microsystems so that it can provide both the computer server and database system to power business.. GLB
“I hate the PC, with a passion.”
— Larry Ellison
“Winning is not enough. All others must lose.”
— Attributed to Larry Ellison
“If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we’re toast. But if it is, we’re golden.”
— Attributed to Larry Ellison
“It’s Microsoft versus mankind with Microsoft having only a slight lead.”
— Attributed to Larry Ellison
“Sometimes I get my tenses mixed up: We have shipped, we will ship…”
— Attributed to Larry Ellison
“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”
— Larry Ellison
“When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal.”
— Larry Ellison
“If an open source product gets good enough, we’ll simply take it. [...] So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that’s what we’ll do. So it is not disruptive at all – you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. [...] We don’t have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.”
— Larry Ellison
Wizards of the Internet: Larry Ellison
Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation, a major enterprise software company.
Larry Ellison was born in New York City, in New York State to Florence Spellman, a 19-year-old unwed Jewish mother. At his mother’s request, he was given to his mother’s aunt and uncle in Chicago to raise. Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison adopted him when he was nine months old. Ellison did not learn the name of his mother or meet her until he was 48; the identity of his father is unknown.
Ellison graduated from Eugene Field Elementary School on Chicago’s north side in January, 1958 and attended Sullivan High School at least through the fall of 1959 before moving to South Shore.
Ellison grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago’s South Shore middle-class Jewish neighborhood. Ellison remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, a Russian Jew from the Crimea who adopted the name Ellison to honor his point of entry into the USA, Ellis Island. Louis, his father, was a modest government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression.
Ellison was a bright but inattentive student. He left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of his second year, after not taking his final exams because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending a summer in Northern California, where he lived with his friend Chuck Weiss, he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he first encountered computer designing. At 20 years of age, he moved to northern California permanently.
Career
During the 1970s, Ellison worked for Ampex Corporation. One of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle".
Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." He founded Oracle in 1977, putting up a mere $1400 of his own money, under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979, the company was renamed Relational Software Inc., later renamed Oracle after the flagship product Oracle database. 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 made this impossible by refusing to share System R’s code. The initial release of Oracle was Oracle 2; there was no Oracle 1. The release number was intended to imply that all of the bugs had been worked out of an earlier version.
In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because of a mismatch between cash and revenues. This crisis, which almost resulted in Oracle’s bankruptcy, came about because of Oracle’s "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses. This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and also to settle out of court class action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison would later say that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake."
Although IBM dominated the mainframe relational database market with its DB2 and SQL/DS database products, it delayed entering the market for a relational database on UNIX and Windows operating systems. This left the door open for Sybase, Oracle, and Informix (and eventually Microsoft) to dominate mid-range systems and microcomputers.
Around this time, Oracle fell behind Sybase. In 1990-1993, Sybase was the fastest growing database company and the database industry’s darling vendor, but soon fell victim to its merger mania. Sybase’s 1993 merger with Powersoft resulted in a loss of focus on its core database technology. In 1993, Sybase sold the rights to its database software running under the Windows operating system to Microsoft Corporation, which now markets it under the name "SQL Server."
In 1994, Informix Software overtook Sybase and became Oracle’s most important rival. The intense war between Informix CEO Phil White and Ellison was front page Silicon Valley news for three years. In April, 1997, Informix announced a major revenue shortall and earnings restatements; Phil White eventually landed in jail, and Informix was absorbed by IBM in 2000. Also in 1997, Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs came back to the company. Ellison resigned in 2002, saying that he did not have the time to attend necessary formal board meetings.
Once Informix and Sybase were defeated, Oracle enjoyed years of industry dominance until the rise of Microsoft SQL Server in the late 90s and IBM’s acquisition of Informix Software in 2001 to complement their DB2 database. Today Oracle’s main competition for new database licenses on UNIX, Linux, and Windows operating systems is with IBM’s DB2, the open source database MySQL, and with Microsoft SQL Server (which only runs on Windows). IBM’s DB2 still dominates the mainframe database market.
In April 2009, Oracle announced its intent to buy Sun Microsystems after a tug of war with IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The European Union has approved the acquisition by Oracle of Sun Microsystems on January 21, 2010 and has agreed that "Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products".
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is a multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing enterprise software products — particularly database management systems. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, United States, Oracle employs more than 101,950 people worldwide as of 2009. It has enlarged its share of the software market through organic growth and through a number of high-profile acquisitions. By 2007 Oracle had the third-largest software revenue, after Microsoft and IBM.
The corporation has arguably become best-known due to association with its flagship product, the Oracle database. The company also builds tools for database development and systems of middle-tier software, enterprise resource planning software (ERP), customer relationship management software (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) software.
As of 2010, Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle Corporation, has served as Oracle’s CEO throughout its history. Ellison also served as the Chairman of the Board until his replacement by Jeffrey O. Henley in 2004. Ellison retains his role as CEO.
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 had heard about the IBM System R database from an article in the IBM Research Journal provided by Ed Oates (a future co-founder of Oracle Corporation). System R also derived from Codd’s theories, and Ellison wanted to make his Oracle product compatible with System R, but IBM stopped this by keeping the error codes for their DBMS secret. Ellison co-founded Oracle Corporation in 1977 under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979 SDL changed its name to Relational Software, Inc. (RSI). In 1982, RSI renamed itself as Oracle Systems to align itself more closely with its flagship product Oracle Database. At this stage Robert Miner served as the company’s senior programmer.
Part of Oracle Corporation’s early success arose from using the C programming language to implement its products. This eased porting to different operating systems (most of which support C). This gave Oracle Corporation an advantage over companies that used operating-system-specific languages. Oracle Corporation programmers wrote the first C compiler for the IBM mainframe platform in order to port to that platform.
References:
Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon. (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon & Schuster
Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Wikipedia: ARPANet…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPAnet
Wikipedia: The Internet…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet
Wikipedia: Larry Ellison…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison
Wikipedia: Oracle Corporation…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation
Web Sites and Blogs:
WikiQuote: Larry Ellison…
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison
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