The History of Oracle Corporation: 2000 - 2013

The History of Oracle Corporation: 2000 - 2013

2000s

In 2000 Oracle Corporation founded the Oracle Mobile subsidiary. Oracle 9i and application server were released and in May Oracle announced the Internet File System (iFS) which was later renamed the Oracle Content Management SDK.

Ellison announced that the company had saved a grand total of $1 billion by implementing and using its own business applications in 2001, and Oracle becomes the first to complete 3 terabyte TPC-H world record. In 2002 they offered the first database to pass 15 industry standard security evaluations, then the following year introduced Enterprise Grid Computing that was release in 2004 with the new Oracle 10g  (g stands for grid here). 13th December 2004 saw Oracle Corporation signing an agreement to acquire PeopleSoft after a long hard battle. They acquired them for $26.50 per share which is approximately $10.3 billion.

Oracle announced a reduction of their combined workforces to 50,000 on 14th January 2005. This was also the year that Oracle released its first free database- Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (XE). In September of the same year Oracle Corporation announced its purchase of Siebel Systems (a CRM technologies producer and provider of business intelligence software) for $5.8 billion.

18th October 2005 dealt a blow to Oracle Corporation as a severe security vulnerability was discovered in their database password management by Joshua Wright of the Sans Institute and Carlos Cid of the University of London. Oracle Corporation stated that the existing safeguards and good industry practices were sufficient defences and did not close the security hole until the release of the 11g DBMS in 2007.

Oracle Corporation announced its acquisition of Portal Software, Inc on 12th April 2006. They acquired the global billing and revenue management solutions provider for $4.90 per share, approximately $440 million. Later one that year in October, Oracle Corporation announced Unbreakable Linux and on 2nd November the same year they announced that they had agreed to acquire Stellent, Inc. They acquired the global provider of Enterprise Content Management through a cash tender offer for $13.50 per share, approximately $440 million.

Further acquisitions followed, on 15th December 2006 Oracle won the majority of MetaSolv, a performance management software solutions provider, and they approved Oracle’s acquisition of MetaSolve Software through a cash tender offer for $52.00 per share, approximately $3.3 billion. The transaction was official on 1st July 2007.

On 22nd March 2007 Oracle was forced to file a court case against a major competitor, SAP AG, for malpractice and unfair competition. The court case lasted until 23rd November 2010 where Oracle won the $1.3 billion lawsuit, known as the largest software piracy judgement in history. SAP still seeks reduction of this jury award, despite admitting the wrongdoings of their unit TomorrowNow which was proven to have downloaded massive amounts of Oracle software illegally.

On 15th May of the same year Oracle buys Agile Software Corporation then on 16th October confirms the departure of John Wookey, the Senior Vice President of Application Development and the head of Application Strategy. This departure causes concern surrounding the release and future of Oracle’s Fusion Application Strategy.

16th January 2008 saw Oracle Corporation announce that it will be purchasing BEA Systems for $19.375 per share in cash for a total of ‘$7.2 billion net of cash.’ Later on in the year in September Oracle revealed that they would be marketing servers and storage in a co-developed data warehouse appliance named the HP Oracle Database Machine. 2008 was also the year that smart scans in software improved the query-response in HP Oracle Database Machine/Exadata storage.

2010s

In 2010 Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems and launched Enterprise Manager Operations Centre which was a platform that managed virtual and physical Sun environments. They also agreed to acquire Phase Forward for approximately $685 million on 16th April 2010. This accomplishment was overshadowed by Oracle being indicated for fraud on 29th July by US Department of Justice.

24th March 2011 Oracle publicised their achievements boasting fiscal 2011 Q3 GAAP total revenues were up by 37% to $8.8 billion and non-GAAP total revenues up by 36% to $8.8 billion. In October of that year Oracle chose to strengthen their cloud service by they acquiring RightNow Technologies Inc for $1.5 billion. On 9th February 2012 they also added Talent Management products and services by acquiring Taleo for $1.9 billion and later in May the social marketing platform Vitrue was acquired for $300 million.

Many companies were bought by Oracle Corporation such as the market intelligence firm Collective Intellect (bought in June 2012), the social marketer Involver (bought July 2012), Acme Packet (bought February 2013) and Tekelec (March 2013). On 31st January 2013 Gartner Inc named Oracle a leader in its latest ‘Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management.’ In May of the same year Oracle Corporations entered an agreement with Paradox Engineering to work on new solutions in the smart city market.

Later on that month they announced new in-memory applications for Oracle Hyperion, Oracle JD Edwards Enterprise One, Oracle Siebel and Oracle E-Business Suite. 23rd October 2013 Oracle entered into an agreement to purchase BigMachines. Now they are using Oracle 12C which is capable of providing cloud services with the Oracle Database.