Bits Blog: Mark Hurd Is Still Intense

Tony Avelar/Bloomberg NewsMark Hurd, co-president of Oracle.

You may have thought Oracle was a hard-charging sales organization even before Mark Hurd showed up. Turns out there was room for more.

“I focus on the same things I always have,” said Mr. Hurd, Oracle’s co-president, in an interview. “You have got to get the strategy right, you have to get the operations right, lined up from R.D. out to the field. I can tell you who is in charge, from R.D. to sales, all the way to deliver that value proposition to the customer.”

Mr. Hurd’s “strategy and operations alignment” approach served him well as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, until he was laid low by his board for expense account irregularities involving a female contract employee. Mr. Hurd resigned in August 2010, and re-emerged at Oracle a few weeks later.

Oracle OpenWorld

Dispatches from the conference.

Mr. Hurd has been holding brief meetings with tightly managed groups of American and overseas reporters during this week’s Oracle OpenWorld, his first significant encounters with the press since leaving H.P. He stayed tightly on message, delivering blunt assessments of what technology customers face, and how Oracle will serve them for all technology. It was a classic “state the need, state the solution” sales approach.

Holding up an Apple iPhone, Mr. Hurd states, “This is a Cray supercomputer.” It has the same processing power as that machine did in 1986 or 1987. “Over the next five years, three billion people will be mobile. There will be 65 zettabytes of data,” he says. (A zettabyte is about one million terabytes, or one sextillion — 10 followed by 20 zeros — bytes.) “The changes are real. Are people going to be doing more e-commerce? Yes. Are people going to be doing more social networking? Yes. Are people going to be more mobile? Yes. Do I think the corporate world is prepared? No.”

Oracle’s proposed answer to this problem, set forth Sunday night by Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, and expanded upon by Mr. Hurd, is a computer architecture of hardware and software designed from the ground up to deliver maximum speed (using Oracle products, of course.) Always a close watcher of the balance sheet, Mr. Hurd said Oracle could deliver this as cost savings, bringing antiquated computer systems up to something like efficiency, or enabling customers to enter new businesses for growth.

“We have customers in banks who say, ‘I don’t care about performance, can you save me money?’” says Mr. Hurd. Other customers, he says, want performance.

Mr. Hurd has been traveling internationally as well as in the United States to take his message to corporations. It is not always comfortable, at least for the client. “I’ve spent a year trying to see a lot of customers, trying to learn our products and technology, trying to build a team,” Mr. Hurd says.

“You see a C.I.O., and it’s a good meeting, because he sees everything. One level below that, you are threatening someone’s business” within the corporation. Because of the tight integration of hardware and software, he said, people gluing systems together aren’t needed anymore. “There is a major transformation that has to occur,” he said.

It’s a rather strong message that works, apparently, when you are selling for a highly integrated, more competitive than ever, tech beast.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=25753eb28fcf6040c0ff940cb1b79795