Oracle’s co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison is stepping down and moving to fill the roles of executive chairman and CTO of the company, and the company will now have co-CEOs: Safra Catz and Mark Hurd.
“Safra and Mark will now report to the Oracle Board rather than to me,” said Ellison in a statement. “All the other reporting relationships will remain unchanged. The three of us have been working well together for the last several years, and we plan to continue working together for the foreseeable future. Keeping this management team in place has always been a top priority of mine.”
According to Oracle, Catz will handle all manufacturing, finance and legal operations of the company, and Oracle’s sales, service and vertical industry global business units will report to Hurd. All of Oracle’s software and hardware engineering functions will continue to be handled by Ellison, who has led the company since it was founded in 1977.
“Larry has made it very clear that he wants to keep working full time and focus his energy on product engineering, technology development and strategy,” said Dr. Michael Boskin, who is presiding director of the Oracle board. “Safra and Mark are exceptional executives who have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to lead, manage and grow the company. The directors are thrilled that the best senior executive team in the industry will continue to move the company forward into a bright future.”
Jeff Henley, who served as Oracle’s board chairman for the past decade, was appointed vice chairman of the board.
The news of the leadership shifts overshadowed Oracle’s quarterly results, which were softer than Wall Street would’ve liked. The company saw an increase of 2.7% in sales to $8.6 billion for the quarter, but investors had expected more.
Catz said during the company’s quarterly call that cloud revenues for Oracle were up 29% year-over-year and that its cloud infrastructure-as-a-service revenues were up 25%.
The “results in the cloud were better than expected,” Catz said. “With us now three times bigger than [enterprise software-as-a-service company] Workday … that’s not enough for us, as our goal is to be bigger than Salesforce, and faster growing than Workday.”
Oracle also plans to roll out a new database cloud offering next week at its Open World event. Ellison said the company’s database offering is its biggest software business and expects it to be Oracle’s biggest cloud product as well.
