WHERE THEY CAME FROM
Oracle was founded in 1977 by programmers Bob Miner, Ed Oates, and Larry Ellison, who still runs the company today. Oracle put its first relational-database product on the market in 1979, and thanks to the company’s indomitable sales force—and Ellison’s instinct for empire building—it has since become a software superpower.

WHAT THEY DO
Oracle develops business databases, middleware, and software applications that manage everything from billing to benefits.

WHAT THEY’VE DONE RIGHT, SORT OF
Oracle C.E.O. Larry Ellison is notoriously disposed to drama, and no company saga has had more of it than Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, another business-software maker. Ellison set his sights on this Silicon Valley neighbor in 2003 when he noticed back-office programs Oracle’s portfolio was missing—and that PeopleSoft was starting to encroach on Oracle’s market share. Enraged, Ellison made a initial bid for the company of $5.1 billion—an offer he’d ultimately more than double before PeopleSoft’s board finally waved the white flag 18 months later. In the interim, Oracle was taken to court by antitrust regulators (with a federal judge ultimately ruling in Oracle’s favor), and PeopleSoft dismissed its anti-Ellison C.E.O. Craig Conway, a former Oracle employee, and restored founder Dave Duffield to the post, clearing the way for the deal to close.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Oracle may not have been ruled a monopoly, but the constantly mushrooming company is as formidable to customers as it is to competitors. And customers know it. A report in Linux Watch, a periodical covering the open-source sector, noted that financial-analysis firms were unwilling to talk openly about their experiences with one of Oracle’s newer products, Unbreakable Linux (which competes with the open-source Red Hat), for fear they might “get into trouble with Oracle.”

Since buying PeopleSoft, Oracle has built an arsenal of industry-dominating software in the communications, office-management, and sales sectors through 20 more acquisitions, including 13 in 2006 alone. Today, the Oracle relational database—the company’s core product—is the industry standard, enjoying a market share of nearly 50 percent.

WHAT’S NEXT
Buying is the easy part. The challenge Oracle perpetually faces is interweaving its new toys into an efficient corporate structure. In terms of product expansion, Oracle continues to strengthen its grip on the data-application sector, as evidenced by its $3.3 billion purchase of Hyperion in March 2007. Oracle is also working to attract more customers in Asia, where Ellison is finding fertile ground to fulfill his tech manifest destiny. —Megan Angelo