Hurd led the database giant with Safra Catz since 2014, though he had announced a medical leave of absence in September. He and Catz had been hired by then-CEO Larry Ellison as copresidents of Oracle in 2010, before taking over as joint CEOs when Ellison stepped aside.
Hurd spent most of his career at NCR Corp., an enterprise technology company specializing in point-of-sale systems and ATM machines. After 25 years, Hurd had risen to the chief executive role before moving over to run computing giant Hewlett-Packard. He was widely credited with making HP into the dominant player in hardware computing during his tenure, a trait that Ellison highly valued when deciding to recruit Hurd to Oracle in 2010.
At Oracle, he was known for spearheading its push into the cloud, playing a major role in its growth.
Here's a look at the life and career of Mark Hurd:
Mark Hurd was born on January 1, 1957, in Manhattan, New York.
He attended Baylor University in Waco, Texas, on a tennis scholarship (where he later had a tennis center named after him). He graduated with a degree in business administration in 1979.
But perhaps his biggest role was overseeing the company’s Teradata data-warehousing division, which NCR acquired in 1999. The tech-centric role would be key for Hurd’s move into enterprise computing after his tenure at NCR.
Hurd is widely credited with growing HP into the computing powerhouse it became through sales of personal computers, laptops, and home printers. Over five years, including the 2008 recession, Hurd had overseen consistent revenue gains that some attributed to his aggressive cost-cutting strategies.
During his tenure, Hurd was named one of Fortune’s Most Powerful People in Business, San Francisco Chronicle’s CEO of the Year, and one of Forbes' "top gun" CEOs.
Hurd eventually resigned from HP in August 2010 after a contractor accused him of sexual harassment. Although an investigation did not find Hurd to be in violation of HP’s code of conduct, it did find irregularities in his expense reports.
One month later, Hurd joined Oracle as president with Safra Catz, with the two taking over for Charles Phillips. Hurd also joined Oracle’s board of directors.
Hurd and Catz were appointed joint CEOs in 2014 by then-CEO Larry Ellison, who had announced he was stepping down and taking the role of chief technology officer.
Under Hurd and Catz, Oracle revamped its sales structure and began the process of moving the business to focus on cloud computing — an area where it's historically been outstripped by rivals including Amazon and Microsoft.
