Oracle founder Larry Ellison is stepping down from his long-time role as CEO. The database giant announced the move in an investor relations statement issued Thursday afternoon.
Ellison, now 70, will assume the position of CTO and executive chairman of Oracle’s board of directors. President Mark Hurd and CFO Safra Katz will take over Ellison’s CEO duties as he transitions to his new role.
“Safra and Mark will now report to the Oracle Board rather than to me,” Ellison said in the statement. “All the other reporting relationships will remain unchanged.”
The reorganization reflects Ellison’s desire to retain Oracle’s current management structure. “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,” Ellison said.
Jeff Henley, who has served as Oracle’s chairman for the last 10 years, will move to vice chairman to make room for Ellison.
The company has not yet provided any concrete reason for Ellison’s move to CTO. But it isn’t entirely surprising. Ellison is a billionaire, and he has put in his time, and in recent years he has signaled a change in priorities: Ellison skipped his keynote last year at Oracle OpenWorld to watch his boat sail in the America’s Cup.
“When Ellison blew off his own customers last year during the America’s Cup, you had to ask where his priorities really lay,” enterprise technology analyst, consultant, and writer Den Howlett of Diginomica wrote in an email to VentureBeat. “Now we know he must feel that for the first time, he has a team in whom he can trust. That’s been a long run issue. It makes for an interesting OpenWorld at the end of this month.” (For more color, read Howlett’s take on the news here.)
Oracle has picked up modest gains in server hardware following its acquisition of Sun. In software, Oracle has been seeing more competition.
In database world, NoSQL options have proliferated and attracted attention and investment alongside or in addition to relational databases from Oracle. Companies like MongoDB, DataStax, and Couchbase have been making progress there.
Meanwhile, Cloudera, which sells a distribution of the Hadoop open-source software for storing lots of different kinds of data, has set its target on companies like Oracle.
Oracle has sought to pick up a lead in the marketing software business, although companies like Salesforce.com and Adobe have been building fast, sometimes by way of acquisitions, in the same style as Oracle.
At the same time, the public cloud has become popular. While Oracle has released standalone applications and some cloud development environments, and while it has argued that its hardware can enable clouds, Oracle isn’t acknowledged as a cloud computing leader. If anyone has that title, Amazon Web Services does.
Ellison’s company, if anything, has been slow to step in as a cloud-infrastructure provider that could compete directly with Amazon and others.
During a Churchill Club talk in 2009, Ellison belittled the rise of cloud computing, or at least the term.
“All it is is computers attached to a network. What are you talking about?” he said.
Ellison founded a consulting company called Software Development Laboratories in 1977, then picked up a contract to build a database codenamed “Oracle” for the CIA. They finished the product early, and used the extra time to build the first ever relational database management system for companies.
The state of Oregon recently filed a scathing lawsuit against Oracle that seeks more than $5 billion from the enterprise software company. Several issues arose over the company’s partnership with the state to create Oregon’s health care website.
The company has made lots of acquisitions to diversify itself. It paid $5.3 billion for point-of-sale hardware and software provider Micros.
And this past weekend, it announced the acquisition of Front Porch Digital, a company with tools for storing and managing films, images, security camera feeds, and other media assets.
Even as Ellison deserves credit for building a startup into a profit-making machine, it’s possible his stepping down will yield a positive outcome.
“With growth slowing for the last few years and general concerns over the company’s cloud strategy (along with some turmoil in the sales force) this could be a good move for Oracle — new management always brings new ideas,” said VB Insight director of marketing technology Stewart Rogers.
Today Ellison boasts a net worth of $51.3 billion, according to Forbes, which pegs him as the fifth richest person on the planet.
Calls to Oracle were not immediately returned.
Oracle’s stock is down 3 percent in after hours trading.
Here’s Ellison announcing new in-memory database capabilities earlier this year:
Mobile developer or publisher? VentureBeat is studying mobile app analytics.
Fill out our 5-minute survey, and we'll share the data with you.
Oracle is the gold standard for database technology and applications in enterprises throughout the world?the company is the world's leading supplier of information management software and the world's second largest independent software... read more »
Larry Ellison is stepping down as CEO of Oracle
No comments:
Post a Comment