Oracle’s Mark Hurd: On Ellison, the cloud and bouncing back

As a Silicon Valley heavyweight, Oracle Corp. certainly employs plenty of brains. But can Mark Hurd give the company a heart?

As co-CEO of the Redwood City software giant, Hurd oversees sales and marketing, which means he is responsible for Oracle’s image to investors, customers and the public.

It’s an image that needs a bit of a makeover.

Long a dominant force in the market for corporate servers and software, Oracle finds itself in an unfamiliar position: playing catchup. Though Oracle generates nearly $40 billion in annual revenue, it lags behind Salesforce.com in cloud computing — the sector that will define the future of the company.

Change has not come easy to Oracle. Until recently, the 37-year-old company has known only one CEO: Larry Ellison. At a time when Silicon Valley startups are capturing the attention of the nation — not to mention customers — this elder statesman of technology firms has appeared especially out of step.

Hurd has a track record of boosting share prices, but he seems an unlikely choice to manage Oracle’s makeover. As CEO of Hewlett-Packard, he was a cost cutter who increased profit by laying off thousands and slashing the budgets for research and development, once the company’s bread and butter. In 2010, he joined Oracle after resigning from HP amid allegations of sexual harassment.

In a rare interview at Oracle headquarters, Hurd spoke about his relationship with Ellison, his efforts to rejuvenate Oracle’s sales force, and why performance always trumps emotions. He declined to speak on the record about the philanthropic efforts of Oracle or Ellison. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison recently named you and Safra Catz as co-CEOs, an unusual arrangement in corporate America. How is that working out?

A: It’s a great team. We’ve been together awhile ... almost five years now. We’ve been going through a lot of transition in the company, and I think it’s taken a lot of effort on our part and all of our skill to get that done.

Q: Do you feel like the lines of responsibility are clear between you and Safra? What is your relationship?

A: We don’t really work it like that. We have things that we do, but we also come together on many decisions as well. Just to be clear, too, Larry’s actually quite active. The technology vision is driven from Larry. We come together as a threesome on many of the strategic decisions that we make as a company.

Q: But isn’t Oracle still really Larry’s company?

A: Well, we’re a big company, Tom. We’re 136,000 people, so we’re a team. Your question really revolves around three people, but our company is a lot deeper than that. We have deep leadership in R&D, we have deep leadership in our sales organization, and so the breadth of executives it takes to run a global entity the size of Oracle is deep.

Q: How did Larry recruit you to Oracle? Did Larry give you specific tasks to work on?

A: Well, I’d known Larry prior to Oracle, so we had a relationship for a long period of time. I think the most attractive thing of coming to Oracle was the chance to reconstitute enterprise information technology around the cloud.

We’ve changed our sales force fairly dramatically. Instead of just calling on a company’s chief information officer to sell him a suite of products, we now call on, individually, the heads of human resources, marketing — all of these functional leaders. We’ve organized our sales force by buyer, by product and, in some cases, by competitor.

It’s been a challenge to get the products right, get our sales organization properly trained. In the next 12 months, we will sell more in the cloud than anybody in the industry.

Q: Do you feel Oracle has turned a corner?

A: I think feelings are interesting, but numbers are better. I think the best thing we can do is to perform. We’ll see how that works out. If it does, it will be an incredible story. I feel very good about the company and strategy and how the company’s running today, but we have got to go every quarter and please and thrill customers, and we’ve got to win them one customer at a time, country by country, market by market.

Q: Oracle hasn’t been the most open of companies when it comes to the media. You’re doing a first-ever media day on April 30. Are you trying to make Oracle more open?

A: When I go traveling overseas, in Japan or in Chile or in Colombia or in Brazil or in Australia, I have a blizzard of things that I do, but almost always I’ll meet with the local media.

We’re now going to do it ... in the U.S., and we’ve done it at Oracle Open World. But Oracle Open World is a very big show, and it revolves mostly around products and product introductions. This’ll be a little bit more of a chance for us to talk about strategy and direction of the market, and I think that’ll be effective.

Q: When you were with HP, your reputation was that of an operations guy, someone who could wring efficiencies and profits out of the system. Do you think you get a fair shake in your abilities as a strategy person, as a person that can grow a business, as opposed to cutting your way to profit?

A: I don’t really think about all these labels that people want to write. I think these are all different companies that are in different positions and have different needs, depending on the strategy of the business. I think efficiency is a good thing. In some cases like Oracle, we’ve had a need for more research and development. Not because our R&D was bad, but because we’ve entered some new markets.

When I was at NCR, I was told I was a growth guy. All we did was grow the company. I remember when I went to HP, somebody said to me, “Boy, this is a massive operations job.” All I know is, the job of the leader is to get the company into the best possible position that the leader can.

Q: You left HP under less than ideal conditions. (In 2010, Hurd resigned from the company amid allegations that he sexually harassed a female contractor. The board cleared him of those charges but ultimately concluded that Hurd had violated company policy relating to expense reports.) Do you feel like you have something to prove at Oracle that maybe you didn’t get to prove at HP?

A: No. When you’re in these assignments, you have to be focused on the assignment at hand. We had a great run at HP. I’m focused on Oracle and realizing the opportunity in front of us.

Q: When it comes to social issues — such as gay marriage and diversity — tech leaders such as Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Apple’s Tim Cook have been vocal advocates. I haven’t heard a lot from Oracle. Do you and Larry see it as part of your job to speak out?

A: We haven’t much. But we have strong opinions in the company about a diverse workforce. It’s a big deal to us. We’re a very Bay Area-centered company. We have 18,000 employees here, and we want to attract the best talent in the world. Just walk around the Oracle campus and you get a feel for how diverse our work environment is. We have not chosen to go out and create theater around it, write letters or get on TV. We try to lead by example.