Business Policy Oracle Case

Oracle is one of the major companies developing Database Management Systems, middle-tier software, supply chain management software, enterprise resource planning software and many others. It was transformed from a start-up into a multi-billion dollar software giant.

Product Development

It all begun in 1976 when Ellison working for the Precision Instruments company that was working on a mass storage concept. Being vice president of research and development department was appealing to his nonconformist temperament.

Ellison put up $2,000 of his own money to start Software Development Laboratories in 1977, in partnership with Oates and Miner as a consultancy business. They soon changed it to software business instead. In the meantime, the demand on the market for prepackaged software programs was growing. There was a need to develop a useful program that could be sold to different companies.

In 1976, Codd from IBM published a theoretical paper on relational databases (RDBMS) that was about a new way of organising large amounts of data using Structured Query Language. Ellison saw commercial viability of the system. For some reason, IBM was quite slow on the development of the database. So it was up to an unknown young company to take a risk and turn the technology into a viable relational database.

Over the next few years SDLI was renamed to Relational Software Inc. and developed the new RDBMS – Oracle. The CIA had invested into the development and commercial release of the product. It was released in 1979 even though it was not reliable.

In 1982 the company was renamed to Oracle with the launch of Oracle Version 3. Again it was not accepted by the customers due to its incompatibility as well as lack of portability. The next step was to develop the system that would be compatible with any machines.

In 1984, Oracle launched Version 4 that was compatible with VAX (computer that was developed by DEC) and many other operating systems.

At that time Ellison saw...