Oracle (computer software)
Oracle is a relational database management system, one of the world’s most popular products. Founded by billionaire Larry Ellison, Oracle’s name came from a CIA project that was code-named "Oracle."
According to published reports by Oracle their 2006 incone exceeded 10 billion dollars, with 25% of their revenue coming from selling applications software to state and local agencies.
Oracle competes with Microsoft’s SQL Server and IBM’s DB2 relational databases. Oracle has traditionally served the large IT market by providing database management for large corporate systems, while SQL Server has traditionally served the small and midcap market.
As of 2007 we see a battle for market share between SQL Server and Oracle, with Oracle driving-down into the small systems market while SQL Server attempts to gather a larger share of the large systems arena.