Oracle Chief Ellison Steps Down as CEO

Oracle’s (ORCL) iconic leader Larry Ellison, who founded the company in 1977, is stepping down as chief executive, handing the helm to current de-facto bosses Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, both of whom will be officially elevated to CEO as Ellison becomes chief technology officer and board executive chairman.

Jeff Henley, Oracle’s 10-year chairman, will transition to board vice chairman. Catz, who handles manufacturing, finance and legal, and Hurd, who commands sales, service and vertical industry business units, will continue in the same capacities as before. Ellison will oversee software and hardware engineering.

Rather than reporting to Ellison, Catz and Hurd now will report to Oracle’s board.

"Safra and Mark will now report to the Oracle Board rather than to me," said Ellison. "All the other reporting relationships will remain unchanged. The three of us have been working well together for the last several years, and we plan to continue working together for the foreseeable future. Keeping this management team in place has always been a top priority of mine."

Ellison didn’t say what prompted his move but Michael Boskin, Oracle’s board presiding director, said it’s not about retiring and so far no one’s connecting it to Oracle’s difficulties to establish a cloud business.

"Larry has made it very clear that he wants to keep working full time and focus his energy on product engineering, technology development and strategy," said Boskin. "Safra and Mark are exceptional executives who have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to lead, manage and grow the company. The Directors are thrilled that the best senior executive team in the industry will continue to move the company forward into a bright future."

Separately, Oracle reported a 3 percent year-over-year revenue uptick to $8.6 billion for Q1 FY 2015 and a GAAP-based 2 percent bump in per-share earnings for the period to 48 cents compared to last year. Net income for the period was flat at $2.2 billion.

Despite missing earnings, Oracle showcased its its cloud sales increases. By portfolio, the vendor’s Software plus Cloud revenue climbed 6 percent to $6.6 billion, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud revenue jumped 32 percent to $337 million, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud revenue was up 26 percent to $138 million. Hardware systems revenue slid 8 percent to $1.2 billion for the quarter.

Ellison said Oracle will kick off its database cloud service at OpenWorld, which runs Sept. 28-Oct. 2 in San Francisco.

"Database is our largest software business, and database will be our largest cloud service," he said.