Mark Hurd Promises To Whip Oracle's Salesforce Into Shape

Oracle is hiring like crazy, particularly salespeople.

Over the last 18 months, Oracle has added 4,000 new salespeople, co-president Mark Hurd said on an analyst conference call in March.

That's nice for Oracle but a little overwhelming for Oracle's customers. The Oracle salesforce is known as one of the toughest machines in the enterprise world. IT professionals say multiple salespeople often bombard them, each selling different products.

Now Oracle co-President Mark Hurd has vowed to change that, creating a sales team that's more streamlined and competent, he told Oracle customers gathered for a customer conference in Denver this week, reports Chris Kanaracus for Infoworld.

"We do not want to be hard to work with," Hurd said. "We have no strategy where we sit in a room and say we want to be harder to work with." Ultimately, he wants customers to be so "thrilled and happy" that they turn "into zealots, to help us ... sell."

That certainly would be a good for the company and its customers. The dysfunction of the sales team has been one reason Oracle's has struggled with its hardware business, sources have told Business Insider.

Revenues have been declining in hardware since Oracle bought Sun. Part of that is planned, Larry Ellison says, because he's dropping low-margin, commodity products.

But the unit was supposed to have leveled off last quarter and start growing this quarter, and it didn't. Ellison now says the hardware unit will grow next year.