Mark Hurd, CEO of enterprise giant Oracle, is pushing through big changes at the Redwood Shores, Calif. company, directing its business more and more toward the cloud.
“We made the decision to go at this hard three or four years ago, changing virtually everything in the company,” Hurd says. “We made the decision to build all these global data centers, to deploy this technology and to do it fast.”
Oracle has long been the backbone of many corporate companies’ operations, and with its growing cloud capabilities, businesses of all sizes can connect their companywide operations anytime, anywhere and from any device. With 430,000 customers in 175 countries, Oracle provides leading-edge capabilities in software as a service, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, and data as a service.
Customers can subscribe to more than a thousand software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, including enterprise resource planning, enterprise performance management, supply chain management, human capital management, and customer experience. Oracle also provides industry-specific applications for running a customer’s core business, on premises or in the cloud, for more than two dozen industries.
Oracle’s open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings enables developers, IT professionals, and business leaders to develop, extend, connect and secure cloud applications, share data, and gain insights across applications and devices. Oracle’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities enable companies to run any workload in the cloud, providing compute, storage, network, container services and more. Oracle Database Cloud Service makes it easy to migrate enterprise workloads to the cloud. Available in the cloud or on premises, the database works seamlessly in hybrid environments.
“We have more application offerings than anybody else,” Hurd, told CNBC. “We’re competing in more categories, franky the biggest categories. For us it really is the bigger picture not just the competition in one segment.”
The next direction for the company is investment in artificial intelligence.
“We believe the application of AI, pattern matching, whatever word you want to use for the technology … is really getting it integrated and embedded into the applications,” he says.
A 30-year veteran of the technology industry, Hurd joined Oracle in 2010. He manages corporate direction and strategy, facilitating company activity in consulting, sales, marketing, alliances and channels, and support. Hurd is also responsible for Oracle’s global business units for industries, creating products for specific markets and industries such as telecommunications, financial services, health sciences, and utilities. Since joining Oracle, Hurd has worked to share Oracle’s strategy and vision with customers, partners, shareholders, and investors.
In 2007, Hurd was recognized by Fortune magazine as one of its 25 Most Powerful People in Business. He has been named multiple times by Business 2.0 magazine as one of the 50 Who Matter. Hurd was featured several times in Barron’s in the publication’s Best CEOs lists. In 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle named him CEO of the Year.
Mark Hurd is No. 75 on Chief Executive and RHR International’s CEO1000 Tracker, a ranking of the top 1,000 public/private companies.
Headquarters: Redwood, CA
Number of employees: 136,000
Age: 55
Undergraduate degree: University of Pennsylvania
Graduate degree: University of Pennsylvania
Previous position: Hewlett-Packard CEO
First job: Sales/business development
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