Mark Hurd is president of Oracle Corp. and a member of the company’s board of directors. He joined Oracle in 2010, bringing more than 30 years of technology industry leadership, computer hardware expertise, and executive management experience to his role with the company. As president, Mark oversees the corporate direction and strategy for Oracle’s global field operations, including marketing, sales, consulting, alliances and channels, and support. He focuses on strategy, leadership, innovation, and customers.
Before joining Oracle, Mark served as chairman of the board, CEO, and president of Hewlett-Packard, where his focus on customers, innovation, improved operational efficiency, and execution led to significant company growth. Prior to that, he spent 25 years at NCR Corp., where he held a variety of management, operations, sales, and marketing roles, ultimately serving as the company’s CEO and president and leading a successful effort to improve operational efficiency, strengthen the product line, and drive growth.
Mark was listed as one of Forbes’ “Market’s Best Managers” for 2009. In 2007, he was named one of Fortune magazine’s “25 Most Powerful People in Business.” He was recognized multiple times by Business 2.0 magazine as one of the “50 Who Matter Now” and by Barron’s in its “Best CEOs” lists. The San Francisco Chronicle honored him as the 2008 CEO of the Year. He appeared on CRN’s “25 Most Influential Executives” list in three separate years and was twice named one of its “Top 25 Executives.”
Mark earned a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration in 1979 from Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, which he attended on a tennis scholarship. He continues to show his passion for tennis, supporting Baylor’s national championship tennis program through philanthropic donations to upgrade and renovate facilities in the Hurd Tennis Building, which is part of the Hurd Tennis Center. He also supports the Baylor Bear Foundation and the Men’s Tennis Excellence Fund.
Since joining Oracle, Mark has worked to share Oracle’s strategy and vision with customers, partners, shareholders, and investors. “Our strategy is complete stack, open, best-of-breed at every single layer of the architecture,” he says. “We vertically integrate those best-of-breed pieces for extreme performance and total-cost-of-ownership benefit to give you differentiation. Our products are designed to be the best technology at every single layer of the stack, and then be vertically integrated. We want to give customers choices for how they access that technology – on premises, building a private cloud, using a public cloud, or a hybrid cloud combination. It’s your choice how you get access to all of this technology.”
As one of the world’s largest enterprise technology companies, Oracle has more than 380,000 customers in 145 countries and annual revenues of $35.6 billion. The company engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in customer data centers – from servers and storage, to database and middleware, through applications. Oracle is the only vendor able to offer a complete technology stack in which every layer is engineered to work together as a single system. Oracle’s industry-leading on-premises and cloud-based solutions give customers complete deployment flexibility and unmatched benefits, including unbreakable security, high availability, scalability, energy efficiency, powerful performance, and low total cost of ownership. The company has an active mergers and acquisitions program, with more than 80 in the past six years, including the industry-transforming acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Mark’s leadership in managing past acquisition integrations has enabled him to take a significant role in Oracle’s acquisition strategy. He is also responsible for Oracle’s global business units for industries, which build products for specific industries such as telecommunications, financial services, health sciences, retail, utilities, and public sector enterprises. Says Mark: “This industry focus is an important strategy for us. We get deeper into these industry verticals because they solve our customers’ most difficult problems, which are very industry- and business-specific.”