Lawrence J. (Larry) Ellison

Lawrence J. (Larry) Ellison is founder and CEO of Oracle Corp., one of the world's largest software companies. Serving as CEO since the firm's inception in 1977, Ellison steered its initial growth as a database software maker and its eventual move into e-commerce in the late 1990s. The recipient of Harvard Business School's Entrepreneur of the Year award, Ellison is considered an information technology industry pioneer. He owns 24 percent of Oracle.

Ellison co-founded Oracle with fellow computer programmer Robert N. Miner in Belmont, California. The partners used their combined experience in specialized database program design to convince the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to hire them to build a $50,000 customized database program. It was while working for the CIA that Ellison recognized the potential profit in IBM's efforts to develop a relational database, using Structured Query Language (SQL), that would allow users to pull corporate data from various sources. Ellison and Miner beat IBM to the market by nearly two years when they launched Oracle RDBMS, the world's first relational database using SQL, in 1978.

When Ellison took Oracle public in 1986, the firm had become one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world, as well as the world's leading database management software maker. Ellison began to focus his firm on the Internet in 1998. According to Business Week Online columnist Sam Jaffe, "Back then, some experts argued that the database software market Oracle dominates would quickly erode as companies found cheaper and simpler ways of managing their data on the Web. Instead the opposite happened—after CEO Larry Ellison ordered an 'Internetization' of his company." Not only did Oracle begin manufacturing products that allowed users to manage data from the World Wide Web, it also began using this e-business technology to streamline its own operations. It was this shift in direction that allowed Oracle to outperform many of its competitors through the end of 2000, although the technology industry's downturn finally took its toll on the firm, when Ellison announced in March of 2001 that sales were slowing.

Along with running Oracle, Ellison also sits on Apple Computer's board of directors. In addition, he serves as chairman of New Internet Computer Co., an upstart he co-founded in January of 2000 to manufacture and sell New Internet Computers—inexpensive machines that offer e-mail capabilities and access to the Internet.