Oracle's Mark Hurd Says He's Got 'No Interest' In Becoming CEO Of Dell

Now that Dell's board is entertaining two new takeover offers that might get rid of founder Michael Dell as CEO, the question is who would replace him.

One of the would-be new owners of Dell, Blackstone Management, is reportedly in hot pursuit of Mark Hurd, co-president of Oracle and Larry Ellison's right-hand man.

Hurd already privately turned Blackstone down, sources told Reuters.

He recently went public with his no-thank-you, too. While opening a new cloud-computing center for Oracle in Tokyo on Monday, reporters asked Hurd if we would leave his current job for Dell.

“I’m very happy at Oracle," he replied. "No interest."

One of Oracle's top PR people, Deborah Hellinger, is helping spread the word of Hurd's lack of interest. She tweeted Hurd's response:

Mark Hurd in Japan goes on the record on #Dell: “I’m very happy at Oracle. No interest." #oracle twitter.com/dhellinger/sta…

— deborah hellinger (@dhellinger) March 25, 2013

Hurd is handling a critical job for Oracle. To lose him now would be a blow to the company. With his experience running hardware-centric companies like Hewlett-Packard and NCR, he's helping Oracle move from its software roots into hardware as it integrates its Sun Microsystems acquisition.

Hardware has been an uphill battle for Oracle, so far. Hardware revenues have declined quarter after quarter. That's been on purpose, Ellison says. Oracle is trimming away low-margin, commodity hardware products it inherited when it bought Sun to focus on its new, highly profitable "engineered systems" where the hardware and software were designed to run together.

In fact, it's unveiling its latest, greatest, faster server later today, too.

Hurd is responsible for building a salesforce that can sell these engineered systems.