Oracle CEO and largest shareholder Lawrence J Ellison named former chief executive of Hewlett Packard Mark Hurd as Oracle’s co-president. The Oracle chief executive Ellison is no stranger to controversy, and he’s sure to point himself in that spotlight once again with this move. Late on Monday Mark Hurd has joined Oracle and was named as a president and director. As you may or may not know, Hurd resigned from HP a month ago amidst an accusation of sexual harassment, questionable expenses reported and the investigation into all things considered.
It’s known that Mr. Ellison, a personal friend of Mr. Hurd staunchly defended his friend going as far as criticizing HP’s board last month after its decisions came down in a letter to the New York Times, saying it was, “the worst personnel decision since those idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.”
It seems that Oracle tends to pick up the ball that HP dropped.
“Mark did a brilliant job at H.P. and I expect he’ll do even better at Oracle,” Mr. Ellison said in the statement. “There is no executive in the I.T. world with more relevant experience than Mark.”
And there is nothing but validity to that statement. Under Hurd the company regained leadership in the PC market from Dell Inc. and used acquisition after acquisition to expand into new markets, such as computer services. His strategy was pretty simple: build a portfolio. Hurd’s departure from H.P. took with him a list of some very noteworthy accomplishments:
2008 – $13.2 billion takeover of Electronic Data Systems Corp., a provider of computer services. Catapulting HP to No. 2 in the services market behind IBM
2010 – Acquired 3Com Corp. for $2.7 billon, beefing up their competition with Cisco Systems Inc. in networking equipment
2010 – Acquired Palm for $1.2 billion, smart-phone maker that was pennies on the dollar purchase
2005-2010 – a slew of software companies (notably Opsware for $1.6 billion) acquiring a vast and deep portfolio
In order to make room for Mr. Hurd on Oracle’s already stuffed board, Charles E. Phillips Jr. resigned and gave up his seat on the board. Oracle is replacing one admitted extramarital affairs person with another. Earlier this year, Mr. Phillips admitted to having said affair after a woman he had been seeing went as far as putting up a web site and billboards detailing their extramarital relationship. Thus now the co-presidents will be Sarfra A. Catz and Mr. Hurd.
The kicker, as if we haven’t already had 11, is that HP has long been one of Oracle’s largest partners in the business computing market. However that was bound to come to an end because Oracle recently acquired Sun Microsystems, one of HP’s longtime rivals in the hardware market. Things atop the Oracle food chain have long been unstable, and this was before the Hurd hiring. Highly sought after executives like Ray Lane, now a managing partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Marc Benioff, now the chief executive of Salesforce.com, have made their way to the exit. The culprit? Largely considered to be Mr. Ellison’s rank as CEO and his personality that seems to always be looking for a fight.
According to the New York Times, Ms. Catz will continue to oversee Oracle’s finance, legal and merger and acquisition operations, while Mr. Ellison will oversee engineering. Mr. Hurd will manage sales, marketing and software support.
I wonder if Ms. Catz is Mark’s type?
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