This paper looks at the strategies adopted by Oracle Corporation to ensure a consistent year on year growth in their core business areas. Oracle Corporation is one of the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest independent software company. The company offers its database, tools and application products, along with related consulting, education, and support services, in more than 145 countries around the world. It employs 43,000 people worldwide of which 21,000 are based in the US while 22,0001 are based outside the US. Its current CEO Larry Ellison founded Oracle in 1977. Identifying relational databases, as a great business opportunity is one of several brilliant moves Ellison made over his career. In the 70's IBM came up with the concept of an inter-connected data store, which allowed users to perform ad-hoc queries. IBM management failed to capitalise on this idea however, but Ellison seized upon it. Customers such a!

s government agencies and manufacturers used Oracle programs to manage their data. From the beginning Oracle was a sales-driven, win-at-all-costs company. With a unique product and a hungry market

this formula turned Oracle into one of the worlds leading company's and Larry Ellison into one of the worlds richest men.

3. www.oracle.com, website, Company annual report, (2000)

rprise applications including, SAP, a German company marketing enterprise resource software, Siebel, in customer marketing relationship are migrating to the web as well. Also a whole new crop of enterprise software companies has built entire businesses around the web from the ground up. There is also a pricing problem with the Internet applications suite strategy. When Microsoft began bundling it desktop computing software for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, it was able to price the additional programs so cheap it was able to nearly knock out competition (WordPerfect, Lotus) out of the market. Oracle however, would find it difficult to execute such a marketing strategy given its expected growth rates.

2. Financial Times, Company analysis (Oracle corporation), (2000)

- Thompson Jr, A, (1999), "Strategic Management", MacGraw-Hill Inc

The Internet applications business is currently worth 30 billion dollars and growing at 25% annually6. Oracle's decision to move into this area has been a good one but also carries many risks. The market for these software applications is changing at Internet speed and is enormously complex. They involve the amalgamation of an entire company's operations and streamlining them. Not surprisingly, given the complexity of all this, Oracle does not have nearly the leverage in this world as Microsoft had when it started serving up suites of desktop applications to PC users. The new e-business strategy may not please Oracle shareholders. There will always be a period of uncertainty with risky ventures amongst investors keeping the share price constant if not being reduced

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Approximate Word count = 1219
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)