Lawrence Joseph “Larry” Ellison is the co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation, an American software company established in the year 1977. Larry Ellison was born in the year 1944, Bronx New York City. He pursued his studies in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was named the science student of the year. A testimony for his strong aptitude for maths and science.He finished his final term in University of Chicago due to family problems. By the time he was 20 he moved to northern California. Here Ellison drifted from job to job for 8 years, working as a technician for Fireman’s Fund and Wells Fargo bank. Also as a programmer at Ampex, he contributed in building the first IBM-compatible mainframe system.

Origin of Oracle:
                     In the year 1977, Ellison and two of his Ampex colleagues, Robert Miner and Ed Oates, started their own company, Software Development Laboratories(SDL). Later in 1979, it was renamed Relational Software Inc and finally it was renamed Oracle. Prior to this Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F.(“Ted”) Codd on relational database systems named “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. Ellison and his partners won a two-year contract to construct a relational database management system (RDBMS) for the CIA with project’s code name: ORACLE. Starting with eight employees and with revenue less than $1 million, Oracle proved to be successful and became a million dollar company hired by IBM for its mainframe systems.

First Loss:
                     In 1986 Oracle went public, raising millions of dollars with its initial public offering. But in 1990, Oracle laid off about 400 employees because of a mismatch between cash and revenues and this resulted in 80 percent drop in Oracle’s market capitalization which pushed Oracle to the edge of bankruptcy. After adopting several new strategies he used his own ideas into product development. In 1992 he launched a new version of the database program Oracle 7, which became a big hit in the database management software. This ensured that it regained its previous status.Oracle made 76% net profits in a single quarter in 2000, and spent more than $25 billion in acquisitions starting from 2004 and acquired PeopleSoft for $10.3billion. Finally in 2007 they acquired business intelligence software provider Hyperion Solutions.

Other shades of Larry Ellison:
                  Ellison is the second largest financier of BMW Oracle Racing. He is now pursuing ownership of a potential future NFL franchise in Los Angeles.

Achievements and Accolades:

• Mr. Ellison received Entrepreneur of the Year from the Harvard School of Business.
• In 2006, Forbes ranked Ellison as the richest Californian.
• In 2008, Ellison is listed on Forbes list of billionaires as the #14 richest person in the
  world.