Business software maker Oracle said its chief executive officer Mark Hurd, 62, would be taking a medical leave.
Mark Hurd will continue to receive all employment benefits during his leave, Oracle said in a statement. In the 2018 fiscal year Mark Hurd received $108.3 million in total compensation, mostly from $103 million in option awards. He earned about $41 million in each of the two prior fiscal years.
Oracle did not reveal more details on Mark Hurd’s health issue and how long his leave would last.
Mark Hurd is one of Oracle’s two CEOs, the other being Safra Catz. Under their tenure, the company has tried to rapidly transition to cloud computing software.
Safra Catz and Oracle founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison will cover Mark Hurd’s responsibilities during his absence.
Mark Hurd was named Oracle co-president in September 2010, a month after he was ousted in a controversial fashion from Hewlett-Packard Co, where he had been chief executive since 2005, Reuters reported.
Mark Hurd had resigned from HP, where was the CEO for five years, after allegations that he sexually harassed an independent consultant, CNBC reported. Before joining HP, Mark Hurd spent 25 years, including the CEO job, at NCR.
When Mark Hurd and Safra Catz were named co-CEOs in 2014, analysts were skeptical about the move. However, cloud software giants like Salesforce.com have since also had a co-CEO structure in place.
Earlier, Oracle lost Thomas Kurian, who was one of the key executives, when he decided to join Alphabet’s Google cloud business in 2018. Amit Zavery, another executive, followed Kurian to Google earlier this year.
Oracle reported revenues of $9.2 billion, showing marginal increase, in the first quarter of fiscal 2020.
The miss indicated Oracle was struggling to make inroads into the highly competitive cloud computing market dominated by the likes of Microsoft and Amazon.com.
Oracle has been aggressively pushing into cloud computing to make up for a late entry into the fast-growing business that helps companies move away from the traditional and costlier on-premise model.
Net income fell to $2.14 billion in the quarter ended Aug. 31, from $2.27 billion a year earlier. Operating income rose 4 percent to $2.9 billion and operating margin was 31 percent during the quarter.
Oracle’s cloud ERP businesses, including Fusion ERP and NetSuite ERP, grew 33 percent in Q1. Oracle has over 6,500 Fusion ERP customers and over 18,000 NetSuite ERP customers.
Oracle added more than 500 new Autonomous Database cloud customers in Q1, and it expects to more than double that in Q2.
Rajani Baburajan
