Larry Ellison: Oracle Will Not Replace Hurd

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison  said the company will not name a new co-CEO to replace the late Mark Hurd and instead will move forward with Safra Catz as its sole leader. Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison  said the company will not name a new co-CEO to replace the late Mark Hurd and instead will move forward with Safra Catz as its sole leader. Ellison made the announcement during the company’s latest earnings call with financial analysts. Hurd passed away in October just weeks after taking a leave of absence from the company for health reasons. “We have no plans for having a second CEO,” Ellison said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the call. “It was an unusual situation where Mark and Safra were an absolutely fantastic team. But we have complete confidence in our existing management team. We’re doing a lot of recruiting and you’ll see a lot of announcements…that we’re hiring a bunch of people at the next layer down. Those people will be the next CEO when both Safra and I retire, which is not anytime soon.” As for its most recent quarter, Ellison said the company was seeing mostly smaller deals for its Autonomous Database product. He explained that most of those deals have been in the $30,000 range, which he said the company prefers to deals in the $100,000 range because they can close the smaller deals “in four weeks.” This also allows Oracle to more quickly prove the platform to the customer, which results in expansion within the organization. “So we’re selling thousands and thousands of small deals,” Ellison said. “And some of those deals are already coming back as larger deals.” Ellison has been touting that platform for more than two years. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to operate without the need for human intervention. As part of his business tutorial, Ellison somewhat complimented rival Amazon Web Services (AWS), explaining that “we’ve decided to take, if you will, an AWS approach to selling Autonomous Database in the cloud.” Ellison has had a long-running and well-documented feud with Amazon, and has liked to boast about how AWS’ business runs on Oracle’s databases. “A company you’ve heard of just gave us another $50 million this quarter to buy Oracle database and other Oracle technology. That company is Amazon,” Ellison said on an earnings call last year. However, Amazon in October said it had completely moved off of Oracle’s databases. While AWS received a form of affection, Ellison continued to shoot fire at SAP. He said that Oracle was taking a lot of SAP’s mid-market customers, many of which “are rooting for us.” “They want to have an alternative to a billion-dollar SAP upgrade,” Ellison said. He further turned the knife by stating that many of these customers are SAP’s biggest customers in its German homeland. Despite the bravado, Oracle’s revenues were basically flat year over year at around $9.6 billion for the second quarter of its fiscal 2020. Cloud services and license support remained the biggest driver of the company’s revenues. Similarly, net income was also stagnate at $2.3 billion for the quarter. Catz played off the flatness as it being “another solid quarter” for the company.