Oracle is Moving to Nashville
In addition to offices, plans for the new tech campus include a park along the city’s Cumberland riverfront, a concert venue, and a hotel.
Larry Ellison, the chairman and chief technology officer the Oracle Corporation and one of the founders of the company 47 years ago, has announced the company is moving its international headquarters to Nashville.
The firm, which is the world’s third largest software company, plans to build a $1.35 billion campus and bring 8,500 jobs to the Tennessee city. Three years ago, the company paid $254 million for a 60-acre site downtown and offered another $175 million for improvement to the city’s public infrastructure.
In addition to offices, plans for the campus include a park along the city’s Cumberland riverfront, a concert venue, and a hotel.
The company sells database software and cloud computing applications. In recent years, it has moved aggressively into the marketing of its health care record keeping system. Two years ago, it bought Cerner, a health information technology company, for $28.3 billion in cash, its largest acquisition ever.
The acquisition made Oracle the second largest electronic health recorder company in the nation, with a market share of almost 29 percent. In Atlanta, the large Northside Hospital system uses the Oracle products for its record keeping.
When asked why he was moving the company from Austin, Texas, Ellison indicated it was being done because Nashville is a health care center.
According to the Nashville Healthcare Council, the city has 900 companies with over a half million employees in the health care industry. Among those companies is HCA Healthcare, which operates 186 hospitals in 20 states and the United Kingdom. Nine of those hospitals are in Georgia. Also headquartered there is Change Healthcare, which operates the largest financial and administrative information systems in America.
The 80-year-old Ellison was born in New York City to an unwed Jewish mother. An aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison, raised him in a Reform Jewish home from the age of nine months and he took their family name. According to Forbes Magazine, he is the fifth wealthiest person in the world, with a fortune estimated at $154 billion.
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