Update: Soon after this story was published, the Wall Street Journal reported that HP will sue former CEO Mark Hurd for breach of contract related to his departure from HP.
Mark Hurd, the recently ousted chief of IT giant HP, has been named co-president of HP partner and sometime rival Oracle Corp., a move that some observers say puts Hurd in line to succeed Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. The HP veteran will serve on the board of directors and report directly to Ellison, the company said on Monday.
Hurd joins Oracle in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal at HP that came to light in early August. Shortly after Hurd announced that he would step down from the HP CEO role, his friend Larry Ellison openly rebuked HP’s board for precipitating Hurd’s ouster, calling it one of the “worst personnel decisions” since Apple showed Steve Jobs the door in the mid-1980s.
This week as he announced Hurd’s appointment as co-president, Ellison again rallied to Hurd’s defense. “Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he’ll do even better at Oracle,” he said in a statement Monday. “There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark. Oracle’s future is [in] engineering complete and integrated hardware and software systems for the enterprise. Mark pioneered the integration of hardware with software when Teradata was a part of NCR.”