Larry Ellison Will Step Down as CEO of Oracle, Will Remain as CTO

http://recode.net/2014/09/18/larry-ellison-will-step-down-as-ceo-of-oracle/

by jhonovich • 12 years ago

271 88 12 years ago

recode.net

joelrunyon2• 12 years ago

Are there any more details into why he's doing this?

mrcharles• 12 years ago

Cause he's going to be CTO instead.

andyl• 12 years ago

Maybe it has something to do with him being 70?

valevk• 12 years ago

Wow, I never knew that he is 70. I thought 40-something. But he looks really young. In this picture he is 69! [1]

[1] http://www.channelweb.co.uk/IMG/834/272834/big-ellison.jpg

nmcfarl• 12 years ago

Wow. Even after you said it I didn't really believe it, but googling confirms it - born in '44. And I thought he was younger than Gates - not 12 years older.

https://www.google.com/search?q=larry+ellison+age

pavlov• 12 years ago

A 70-year-old starts a new career as a CTO? If only other high tech companies were this open-minded about employing seniors.

mhurron3• 12 years ago

Busy producing an Iron Man suit? Running Oracle is getting in the way of being a Bond level supervillan?

There could be lots of reasons.

jsmthrowaway• 12 years ago

What is it about Ellison that makes people say Bond villain, beyond the yacht and such? You're not the first person I've heard say that. (I'm not critiquing, I think it's amusing.)

acornax• 12 years ago

Pressure from the board maybe..?

turar• 12 years ago

Co-CEOs? I only know one company that had co-CEOs, and that didn't work out well for them.

winslow• 12 years ago

Which company was that?

jcagalawan2• 12 years ago

My guess is BlackBerry/Research in Motion.

dblohm7• 12 years ago

RIM

noblethrasher• 12 years ago

Probably RIM.

budu3• 12 years ago

Probably RIM/Blackberry.

jcagalawan2• 12 years ago

SAP did pretty well under co-CEOs.

solomone• 12 years ago

It worked pretty good for MySpace... oh wait

MagicWishMonkey• 12 years ago

Yep, it's like Hurding Catz.

Ok I'll show myself out.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

Ellison, Hurd and Catz. It does sound like Groucho Marx should be playing at least one of them.

AtmaScout• 12 years ago

No no, you can stay.

wuliwong4• 12 years ago

well done. LOL someone voted this down??? I never understood the anti-humor folks on HN.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

That's beautiful. So Ellison is Hurding Catz now?

Ologn• 12 years ago

Very good. I'm pointing http://hurdcatz.com and http://hurdingcatz.com to MariaDB's web site...until I get a legal letter from Oracle.

(Actually every fourth load it goes to Bluehost instead, I have to look at my BIND and Apache later...)

rodgerd2• 12 years ago

I will be very disappointed if a Register subeditor isn't cutting and pasting this for a headline.

ArkyBeagle• 12 years ago

It had to be done.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

120+ points, and who says HN has no sense of humor :)

dsl• 12 years ago

I started digging into companies with Co-CEOs and found this: "Research by consulting firm Mercer found that as of the end of 2008, just 34 of 6,487 public firms, or 0.5 percent, had co-CEOs."

_mayo• 12 years ago

Do you have a link?

lubos• 12 years ago

Atlassian is also run by two CEOs

milkshakes• 12 years ago

samsung has 3 CEOs: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/14/samsung-now-has-3-ceos-with...

appstateguy• 12 years ago

Samsung is one of the most complex companies around. Check out their ownership structure: http://qz.com/223755/samsungs-bizarre-byzantine-ownership-st...

mkempe• 12 years ago

Sapient?

stevenspasbo• 12 years ago

Workday did it for about 8 years. Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri did pretty well, with Dave just stepping down a few months ago.

chollida1• 12 years ago

Interesting that they name Co-CEO's in Catz and Hurd. I wonder how that will work, especially given Hurd's "tough to work with" reputation.

Interestingly Ellison will be the CTO. This could be a shit show with 3 people trying to run the show!

I mean does anyone really expect Larry Ellison to start taking marching orders. Will be interesting to watch the short interest on this company!

I think the two headed CEO is what the street expected all along as Catz has been around for ever and alot of people thought that Hurd, the former HP CEO, was promised the CEO title when Ellison resigned.

It looks like they, Catz and Hurd, will split the running of day to day operations as Hurd gets sales, marketing and strategy reporting to him, while Catz will continue to have finance, legal and manufacturing.

Its down about a dollar after the close on about a third higher trading volume than normal. So it doesn't look like anyone is "spooked" by the news.

keebEz2• 12 years ago

Oracle has been run by the three of them for awhile now. This is most likely a reduction in the responsibilities for Larry (ie. not getting flak for skipping out on earnings calls/keynotes when he wants to watch his boat race) and thus mostly a change in title without significant change to operations (other than messaging to the Street what the succession plan is).

j_baker2• 12 years ago

Yeah, I think Ellison is heading for a "phased" retirement. Eventually, he'll give up the CTO role and just be Chairman. Then he'll give up the Chairman role (perhaps when he dies).

mathattack4• 12 years ago

I think you're right. At first I thought it would be to bring out a knife fight. In reflection, it seems like they're going towards a triumvirate similar to Google. Larry wants to be Eric Schmidt, but can't be if he's got the CEO title. Everyone would defer to him for everything.

linuxfault• 12 years ago

Safra has been the driver of this car for a long time now anyway. Larry is more of a figure. Hurd is an asshole.

Apocryphon• 12 years ago

Ellison will still be around? This sounds like when Putin and Medvedev swapped being president and prime minister of Russia.

astrodust• 12 years ago

That was to avoid running afoul of term limit rules.

j_baker2• 12 years ago

The thing that is weird to me is that Ellison is CTO. I don't really think he's a highly technical person, or is he?

swartkrans• 12 years ago

Why do you think that a CTO has to be highly technical? Does a CTO at a big technology company write code? Line level engineering managers don't even write code a lot of the time. You just deal in the high-level abstract.

phillmv• 12 years ago

Not to dwelve too far into Oracle hagiography but,

During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His projects included a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks".[10] In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) with two partners and an investment of $2,000; $1,200 of the money was his.

It's really not clear from the first few hits off Google what his role was in developing Oracle, the application, but he's not like, _untechnical_.

rodgerd2• 12 years ago

Someone I spoke to after the Sun merger said one of the adjustments Sun engineers had to make was Ellison wandering around desks in Oracle talking about what people were working on, and asking "That looks cool. What could you achieve if I gave another $x million in funding?" if the technology looked interesting to him.

A received anecdote, but the thrust was that Ellison is pretty keenly interested in how it all works, as well as being a ruthless businessman.

damoncali• 12 years ago

It will be like herding cats.

sebst2• 12 years ago

Will Oracle then become better? Maybe as good as Sun used to be?

just dreamin'...

valarauca1• 12 years ago

I doubt this'll happen. I wish this would happen. But I sincerely doubt this will happen. Sun really felt like a once in a life time company. I think the best thing we can hope for is board room infighting will just kill Oracle.

smacktoward• 12 years ago

I'm guessing he wants to spend more time wringing extortionate license fees out of his family?

mindcrime2• 12 years ago

Not really sure what to say about this. I don't know Ellison, nor do I own Oracle stock, or have any particular interest in Oracle per-se. But nonetheless, I've always seen Ellison as an important character in our industry, and after reading a biography about him, I felt a sort of kinship with him based on some shared interests.

At any rate, it definitely feels like the "end of an era" in a sense. I got my start in this industry in the mid to late 90's when Oracle, IBM, Novell, Microsoft, Borland, etc. were duking it out for supremacy, and - for better or worse - you've never really been able to escape Oracle's shadow to some extent. And Ellison was Oracle, in so many ways.

Edit: It's been a while, but I think this[1] was the biography I read. I'll just say this: regardless of what you think of Ellison, he's an interesting character and reading about the history of Ellison / Oracle is quite fascinating.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Softwar-Intimate-Portrait-Ellison-Orac...

lawnchair_larry• 12 years ago

I'm not sure that you want to be finding kinship with sociopaths.

mindcrime2• 12 years ago

I don't really buy that line of thinking. Nobody is perfect, and I don't see denying "a certain sense of kinship" with a fellow human being, which is based on certain shared interests, just because I might dislike or disapprove of other aspects of that person's character.

That said, I don't think I'd like Larry Ellison if I knew him (although I could be wrong). I'm just saying that there are things about him where I can see some overlap in thinking and interests. It doesn't mean I want him sainted or anything. :-)

dm8• 12 years ago

If you want to read about Larry Ellison's personality and his management style, you should read - "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation; God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison". (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/181369.The_Difference_Bet...)

It's one of the best books written on him and the way he managed Oracle right from it's beginnings. He was damn good at selling things.

mathattack4• 12 years ago

Very good book.

He will be revered, but he was behind some scandals back in the day.

sebst2• 12 years ago

Oracle's stock has already dropped 2.5%.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/18/oracle-stock-drops-2-5-on-n...

justinph2• 12 years ago

What is with the capitalization on the headline on Recode? I read it and thought, who is "Will Remain"?

It should be: Larry Ellison will step down as CEO of Oracle, will remain as CTO

Headline capitalization is pretty easy: Capitalize the first word, then any proper nouns. That's it.

keebEz2• 12 years ago

It is correct according to most commonly used guidelines for headline capitalization. You were describing how to capitalize stuff in a paragraph, not a headline.

http://www.grammarunderground.com/capitalization-of-headline...

justinph2• 12 years ago

Well, I stand corrected. Dang.

traek• 12 years ago

Headline capitalization is pretty easy: Capitalize the first word, then any proper nouns. That's it.

Not really accurate. Some publications use sentence case for headlines, but most publications use (and most style guides suggest) title case.

IvyMike• 12 years ago

Still pretty popular in newspaper land. Despite your protestations, both the NYT and the WSJ websites still use title case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_publi...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/technology/larry-ellison-s... http://online.wsj.com/articles/larry-ellison-to-step-aside-a...

P.S. The other three sites I checked (LA Times, USA Today, and Washington Post) websites do not.

bsimpson• 12 years ago

Someone in The Verge's comment section noted that this Forbes list will now need to be updated:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/forbes-releases-2014-list-o...

spindritf• 12 years ago

The final Larry Ellison scorecard: Oracle stock is up 89,640% since he took the company public in March 1986.

https://twitter.com/dkberman/status/512700128801464320

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

Demonstrating once again that tech companies really don't "get" succession planning :-) I'm kind of half joking, if you look at a bunch of 'old school' BigCorps, the progression is (CEO->Chairman, SVPx -> CEO, VPx -> SVPx) and then the Chairman of the board retires and the CEO takes on both roles Chairman and CEO, priming the pump for the next cycle.

Co-CEOs have so far been an experiment in disaster, something about not having an ultimate authority seems to really crimp organizations. I wish Oracle well but they have a lot of challenges to overcome, if I were a share holder I wouldn't be all that pleased with this arrangement as it seems to basically leave all the same people in place with all the same problems (Amazon/Google EC2/GCE, MySQL vs NoSQL vs expensive Oracle, Cheap Clusters with High Reliablity vs Expensive Servers, Etc.)

falsestprophet• 12 years ago

Larry Ellison may "get" more about running a Fortune 100 tech company than you give him credit for.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

You misinterpret my comment. He is masterful at running Oracle, the problem is he is mortal. Successions are all about building institutions that are immortal. Which is to say they continue to exist even as humans come and go. That is one of the key differences between a democracy and a dictatorship. In the latter when the dictator dies the country goes into civil war until another dictator arises, but in a democracy the 'people' in the system are constantly replaced by the country continues. Same is true for corporations. Technology companies tend to be driven more by one or two individuals who don't design an institution so much as they just run the business. I am fascinated that places like Ford and IBM have been as durable as they have been.

azifali• 12 years ago

The end of an era for Oracle that existed as a software (licensing) company. I think that Ellison stepping in as the CTO is probably more important than him stepping down as the CEO.

This move will perhaps will lay the groundwork for the next tens of billions in revenue for Oracle, in cloud based software and infrastructure.

Larry Ellison Will Step Down as CEO of Oracle, Will Remain as CTO

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