The life and career of Mark Hurd, the CEO of Oracle who passed away at the age of 62

Megan Hernbroth

Oct 18, 2019, 23:59 IST

The life and career of Mark Hurd, the CEO of Oracle who passed away at the age of 62

Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

Mark Hurd

Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, died on Friday.
The 62-year-old chief executive had been on medical leave from the company since September.
Before joining Oracle, Hurd was the chairman, CEO, and president at Hewlett-Packard. He resigned in 2010 amid allegations of sexual harassment surfaced against him. He was widely credited with the company's dominance in computing hardware during his tenure.
Hurd began his career at NCR Corporation, where he worked for 25 years and eventually rose to occupy the CEO chair.
Here's a look back at the life and career of Mark Hurd.
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Mark Hurd, one of Oracle's two CEOs, died on Friday at age 62.

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 co-presidents of Oracle in 2010, before taking over as joint CEOs when Ellison stepped aside.

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Hurd spent most of his career at NCR Corporation, 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 back at the life and career of Mark Hurd:

Mark Hurd was born on January 1, 1957, in Manhattan, New York.

He attended Archbishop Curley-Notre Dame High School, in Miami, Florida. He graduated in 1975.

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.

After graduation, Hurd became a junior salesman at NCR Corporation in San Antonio, Texas. The company specialized in point-of-sale systems and ATM machines.

Hurd worked for NCR for 25 years in a variety of roles, including management, operations, sales, and marketing.

By 2001, he was named president of NCR. In 2002, he was named chief operating officer of the organization.

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.

He eventually landed the CEO job in 2003, where he remained until 2005.

After leaving NCR, Hurd joined computing giant Hewlett-Packard as CEO following Carly Fiorina’s ouster in 2005.

Hurd was one of HP’s first CEOs to also hold the title of president, but he was not appointed as chairman of the board of directors until 2006.

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 which 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 completely 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.

Hurd announced that he was taking a medical leave of absence in September 2019, making Catz the sole CEO at Oracle.

On Friday, October 18th, the company announced that Hurd had passed away at the age of 62. He's survived by his wife, Paula, and two daughters.

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