"There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark [Hurd]" declared Oracle's founder & CEO Larry Ellison yesterday, as Oracle announced that Charles Phillips (pictured), who as Co-President with CFO Safra Catz has evolved Oracle's field culture toward a more customer-centric organization and improved its top line consistency through a period of tremendous change and growth, would be transitioning out of the company to make way for the ex-HP CEO.

“Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he’ll do even better at Oracle,” said Ellison in a press release issued Monday. Hurd will report to Ellison.



Hurd, who is additionally joining Oracle's board of directors, resigned from HP in August, with a golden parachute of $40M that ought to have tided him nicely over the four weeks between his resignation and this new appointment. In a Labor Day statement in conjunction with his arrival at Oracle he said:

"I believe Oracle's strategy of combining software with hardware will enable Oracle to beat IBM in both enterprise servers and storage. Exadata is just the beginning. We have some exciting new systems we are going to announce later this month at Oracle OpenWorld. I'm excited to be a part of the most innovative technology team in the IT industry."

Look out IBM, the enterprise IT space is going to be hotting up to an extent not witnessed for a decade!