Who is Oracle and where do they come from?

Oracle at a glance

Global Workforce: 43,000
Revenues 2004: $10.15 billion
Net income 2004: $2.6 billion

Oracle Corporation was founded in 1977 in Redwood, California. They introduced the first Relational Database Management System based on the IBM System/R model and the first database management system utilizing IBM's Structured Query Language (SQL) technology.

Today, the Oracle DBMS is supported on over 80 different operating environments, ranging from IBM mainframes, DEC VAX minicomputers, UNIX-based minicomputers, Windows NT and several proprietary hardware-operating system platforms, and is clearly the world's largest RDBMS vendor.

Oracle employs more than 43,000 professionals in 93 countries around the world. Their expenditure for research and development is approximately 13% of their revenues.