Ex-HP chief joins Oracle as company president

MARK HURD, who resigned as chief executive of Hewlett Packard last month following a claim of sexual harassment against him, has joined Oracle as president of the company.

Mr Hurd, who will report directly to chief executive Larry Ellison, has also been appointed to Oracle’s board of directors.

He will be joint president of Oracle with Safra Katz, a director of HSBC Holdings, who has held her post with Oracle since January 2004.

Charles Phillips, a former investment banker with Morgan Stanley, has resigned as president of Oracle to make way for Mr Hurd.

In a statement issued by Oracle, Mr Ellison said Mr Phillips had told him of his intention to leave the company last December, but he had asked him to stay on while Oracle integrated Sun Microsystems.

Oracle bought Sun, the inventor of Java software and with a significant hardware division, for more than $7 billion last year, moving Oracle into hardware for the first time. Before this, the company was best known for its database software and suite of business applications that are primarily used by large companies.

Mr Hurd is a personal friend of Mr Ellison.

Last month the Oracle chief executive sent an e-mail to the New York Times supporting his friend after his departure from HP.

“The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago,” Mr Ellison wrote.

The rapid appointment of Mr Hurd to a senior role with Oracle will come as an embarrassment to the board of HP.

Mr Hurd, who was previously chief executive of NCR, oversaw a turnaround in the fortunes of HP which saw it retake Dell as the largest seller of PCs globally and overtake IBM as the largest technology company.

HP’s share price languished at about $20 when Mr Hurd took over, but it increased by more than 130 per cent during his tenure.

The claim of sexual harassment against Mr Hurd, made by a former HP contractor, was not proven but an investigation found he had claimed personal expenses as business ones.

At Oracle, Mr Hurd is expected to oversee the integration of its software technologies with the servers and other hardware acquired through the Sun purchase.