Who was the CEO of Oracle from 1977 to 2014?

Larry Ellison was Oracle’s CEO from the company’s founding in 1977 until September 2014.

Ellison co-founded Software Development Laboratories with Bob Miner and Ed Oates in 1977. The company later became Relational Software and then Oracle, taking its name from its flagship database product. Ellison’s long tenure made him the defining executive in Oracle’s rise from a small database startup into a global enterprise-software company.

Oracle’s early breakthrough came from commercializing relational database technology, an approach based on organizing information into linked tables that could be queried efficiently. The company went public in 1986 and expanded through software development and acquisitions, including PeopleSoft, Sun Microsystems and other major technology businesses.

The date can cause confusion because Ellison did not leave Oracle in 2014. He stepped down as CEO but became executive chairman and chief technology officer. Safra Catz and Mark Hurd then served as co-CEOs, while Ellison continued to shape Oracle’s technology strategy.