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Larry Ellison Bio, Founder of Oracle

The co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Oracle Corporation, Larry Ellison, was born in New York City on August 17, 1944, and adopted by his great-aunt and -uncle, who raised him in Chicago. He left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when his adopted mother died, briefly attended the University of Chicago, and then moved to northern California at age 20.

Having been introduced to computer programming in college, Ellison took a job in the 70s with the Ampex Corporation, working on a database for the CIA which he called Oracle. The project was inspired by an Edgar Codd paper on relational database systems, and in 1977, Ellison started his own company with a small investment -- Software Development Laboratories, later renamed Relationship Software Inc., later renamed again Oracle, after its flagship product. Though Oracle was unable to best IBM in the mainframe relational database market, the company flourished, though it barely survived a 1990 financial crisis caused by marketing mistakes and the mishandling thereof. Nevertheless, due to IBM's failure to seize the moment, Oracle, Sybase, and Informix were able to virtually shut it out of the microcomputer relational database market with software for Unix and Windows machines. Sybase and Informix both had bigger market shares in this area than Oracle did, but Sybase sold its Windows database software to Microsoft in 1993 (that software is now marketed as SQL Server) and after three years of intense competition, Oracle finally overtook Informix in 1997. Ellison was appointed a director of Apple Computer upon Steve Jobs' return that same year, serving for five years before resigning for lack of time.

Oracle enjoyed the top spot in its market for the latter part of the 90s, but now competes with Microsoft's SQL Server, IBM's acquisition of Informix, and the open-source MySQL. IBM continues to dominate the mainframe market unrivaled. The need for powerful databases nevertheless keeps Oracle a highly profitable company, and Forbes considers Ellison the ninth richest man in the world.

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