Oracle

Oracle is an American software company founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. Its first and most famous product is Oracle Database, one of the first commercial relational databases using SQL. For decades it has been where banks, airlines, telecoms and governments keep their most important records: accounts, bookings, invoices, payroll.

Around the database it built a large set of business applications: software for accounting, purchasing, human resources and supply chains, the kind of system often called ERP. It grew partly by buying other companies, such as PeopleSoft, NetSuite and Sun Microsystems, which brought it the Java programming language and the MySQL database. It also owns Cerner, a maker of electronic health record systems used by hospitals.

Its traditional business model is licenses plus support: customers pay for the right to use the software and then a yearly fee for updates and help, which brings in steady income for many years. More recently it sells the same things as a cloud service, through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which rents servers and databases from Oracle's own data centers, and it has become a large supplier of computing capacity for training AI models.