ELLISON TO RETIRE FROM FIRM HE FOUNDED .
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Silicon Valley just got a little less colorful ...
Lawrence J. Elisson announced his retirement as chief executive
of Oracle , a company he founded in 1977 that has transformed
the way businesses use technology and made him one of the world's richest
people .
The move , effective immediately , is one of the last times that one of the
tech industry's first generation of celebrity executives is exiting the role of
a chief . Mr Ellison's generation of leaders took computers from the back
offices of a few big institutions and into everyday life .
" By a lot of definitions , it's the end of an era , " said Zach
Nelson
chief executive of NetSuite , who worked at Oracle from 1992-96.
Mr. Ellison is the largest investor in NetSuite , a company that uses
so-called cloud computing technology to manage things like retailing . " He's
the longest-tenured founder and CEO in the Valley . "
Mr Ellison will become executive chairman and will continue to work on
Oracle's technology as its chief technology officer ,
the company said in a statement .
Along with Bill Gates at Microsoft and Andy Grove at Intel , Mr. Ellison
was one of the most important and flamboyant figures of tech's early boom years
.
His personal fortune , estimated by Bloomberg at about $46 billion , has
helped Mr.Ellison become one of the most recognizable people in the tech
industry .
Despite all this , Mr.Ellison does not seem ready to leave Oracle .
The executive , who turned 70 in august , said during a conference call
with financial analysts that he would " continue doing what I've doing for the
past several years " , including
overseeing Oracle's tech development , making final decisions on corporate
matters and even appearing on quarterly earnings
calls . Oracle's software and hardware are involved with the ways that
companies and large organizations store and manage their data , as well as
sophisticated applications for running things like international manufacturing
and corporate financial systems . Oracle, is based in Redwood Shores ,
California and
occupies over 120.000 employees .
Born to an unwed mother in N.York , he was adopted by his aunt and uncle
and grew up in Chicago .
He attended college but did not graduate and took a job in the computer
business .
An early project involved writing for the CIA a data base that could turn
numbers into information . The idea, pioneered by IBM , was to relate one set of
data to another , for example ,
a row of people's names with a column of their birth dates .
This , in turn , could be combined in a table of , say , all people born
under the astrological sign Leo .
In 1977 , Mr Ellison created a company called Software Development
Laboratories to sell their product , the relational database , to the government
. Finishing the project ahead of schedule , he turned the database into software
for businesses .
After a second name change , the company became Oracle in 1982 . Mr.Ellison
proved to be a master salesman as well as an able technologist with a good eye
for managing talent , and Oracle became a dominant maker of software for
businesses .
He was also adept at changing Oracle with the technological times . The
company was born in an era when mainframe computers were giving way to
minicomputers , and it managed to dominate business computing through the rise
of personal computers , computer servers and the Internet .
Once a foe of growth through acquisitions , over the last several years
Mr.Ellison has spent billions getting Oracle into cloud computing , considered
the next wave in technology .
Mr.Ellison does not leave his company entirely untroubled .
Besides continuing challenges in cloud computing , including acquisitions
and new competition , the company faces new types of databases , first developed
inside Google and Yahoo , that also threaten the dominance of the relational
database .
In addition to NetSuite , Mr. Ellison is also a major investor in
Salesforce , another premier company in the next generation of business
computing .
