Yesterday, Vox somehow managed to write an entire article about the history of Oracle and its founder Larry Ellison without mentioning the CIA even once.
Oracle came out when most databases were on mainframes and usually came from IBM. For the longest time, they were the only production-ready option if you had a server from the likes of DEC, Sun, or HP. That was, until MSFT came up with SQLServer, and MySQL and Postgres showed up as open-source options.
Then Oracle went into application verticals, like manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, government, etc. These were all complex applications with lots of knobs and levers to tweak, making for long contracts and a lot of professional services. To this day, a lot of their money comes from these sticky apps and long-term contracts.
Whether they were funded by CIA or not, many early software vendors needed government subsidies and contracts to survive. Oracle was also pretty late to the cloud market. They didn’t really jump in until AWS started offering Oracle license “lift and shift” along with migration support to RDS. Before that, all Oracle DBs had to be self-hosted.
This article implies the connection to CIA gives the government access to customer data. In reality, until their cloud offering, all Oracle instances were inside corporate firewalls, with no external access. I’m not a big fan of their software, but this article smells like guilt by early association.
Oracle came out when most databases were on mainframes and usually came from IBM. For the longest time, they were the only production-ready option if you had a server from the likes of DEC, Sun, or HP. That was, until MSFT came up with SQLServer, and MySQL and Postgres showed up as open-source options.
Then Oracle went into application verticals, like manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, government, etc. These were all complex applications with lots of knobs and levers to tweak, making for long contracts and a lot of professional services. To this day, a lot of their money comes from these sticky apps and long-term contracts.
Whether they were funded by CIA or not, many early software vendors needed government subsidies and contracts to survive. Oracle was also pretty late to the cloud market. They didn’t really jump in until AWS started offering Oracle license “lift and shift” along with migration support to RDS. Before that, all Oracle DBs had to be self-hosted.
This article implies the connection to CIA gives the government access to customer data. In reality, until their cloud offering, all Oracle instances were inside corporate firewalls, with no external access. I’m not a big fan of their software, but this article smells like guilt by early association.