Ellison steps aside as Oracle CEO

Oracle co-founder becomes executive chairman and CTO while Mark Hurd and Safra Catz become co-CEOs

Larry Ellison, who has led Oracle as CEO since the 1970s, has stepped aside. He will stay on at Oracle as executive chairman and CTO, while the CEO role will be split between Safra Catz and Mark Hurd.

Ellison co-founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in 1977, renaming it Oracle in 1982. Under Ellison's leadership Oracle became almost synonymous with enterprise relational databases, growing to be one of the largest technology firms in the world.

However, latterly Ellison has made a number of strategic decisions that have been unpopular with investors, including the move into hardware with the 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems for $7bn, which is widely seen as being unsuccessful, and his initial opposition to cloud computing which has left the firm playing catch-up in one of the biggest changes in IT in a generation.

Despite his stepping aside as the public face of Oracle, many analysts have little doubt that Ellison, who is 70, will remain the driving force behind the company.

"In almost all cases, these co-CEO configurations are a jerry-rigged solution to a political problem," Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale School of Management, told Reuters.

If the move was designed to calm investors' jitters it has been unsuccessful, at least in the short term, with Oracle shares falling 2 per cent in after hours trading yesterday, largely as a result of weak hardware sales.

The company's leadership was keen to state that changes at the top would have no effect on the overall structure of the company.

"I'm going to continue doing what I've been doing over the last several years. They're going to continue what they've been doing over the last several years," Ellison said on a conference call, going on to say that Hurd and Katz deserve new job titles.

"There will actually be no changes," said Catz. "No changes whatsoever."

Catz, who joined Oracle in 1999 and was CFO before the latest development, previously worked in the investment banking sector, while Hurd, who was co-president, has a background in sales, joining Oracle from HP in 2010. Analysts and competitors were quick to predict personality clashes at the top.

"Co-CEO structures are typically not ideal," said analyst Bill Kreher. "They're both very independent thinkers who have strong wills."

"There always has been, and always will be, one CEO at Oracle," tweeted Marc Benioff, CEO of rival Salesforce.com.