“The day we left India was the first day we saw a computer,” said George Kurian, who after graduation worked at Oracle while Thomas Kurian was a consultant at McKinsey. The two also went to Stanford Business School together.

Mark V. Hurd and Safra A. Catz, both chief executives at Oracle, manage the company’s sales and finance. Mr. Ellison, who is 71 and shows no inclination to retire, counts on Mr. Kurian to run the core of any big tech company: thousands of engineers.

The NetSuite deal is something of a coming-out party for Oracle’s global cloud, possibly signaling the start of a new round of acquisitions, along with hefty spending to keep building out this network. But spending upward of $2 billion a year on building a cloud network, Mr. Kurian said, is table stakes for the biggest tech companies.

In NetSuite, Oracle saw a cloud company whose sales of e-commerce and manufacturing software to smaller businesses were stalling as it tried to move into international markets. Oracle figured it could distribute that software efficiently over its cloud. It also hopes to reach smaller companies that can’t afford Oracle’s traditional high-cost, high-maintenance product.

Mr. Ellison played no role in the acquisition of NetSuite, according to Oracle, since he owns about 40 percent of that company. Mr. Ellison, who is already worth $45 billion, according to Bloomberg, will reap another $3.7 billion on the NetSuite deal. He still attends regular corporate strategy sessions, along with Mr. Hurd, Ms. Catz and Mr. Kurian, grilling each on their respective portfolios.

Oracle has hundreds of different types of software for businesses, but more than anything it is known for powerful databases. Many global airlines, banks and manufacturers wouldn’t function without them.

Customers treat the big, Oracle-strength software like sacred objects that should never be altered, while they’re happy to experiment, for example, with a new offering from Amazon. That’s one reason Oracle has a hard time moving toward new technology, said Steve Miranda, Oracle’s vice president of applications development.