Mark Hurd made his on-stage debut as an Oracle president on Sept. 20, pitching a new data handling machine and saying it was good to be part of the team.
In keeping with the tone set by Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison a night earlier at the kick-off of the company's annual OpenWorld conference here, Hurd steered clear of any comments aimed at HP.
Oracle struck an amicable tone at OpenWorld, spotlighting collaboration with HP on products for some 140,000 joint customers and making no mention of the squabble over Hurd's move.
Approximately 41,000 people from more than 100 countries are registered to attend what Oracle billed as the world's largest technology conference.
Hurd told attendees that Oracle plans to invest four billion dollars in research and development in its current fiscal year.
He then enthusiastically unveiled an Exadata Database Machine X2-8 with beefed-up storage capacity, security, and speedy retrieval of information.
"Not a bad two weeks on the job," Oracle executive vice president of systems John Fowler quipped as Hurd turned the presentation over to him and left the stage.
Also on Sept. 20 Hewlett-Packard resolved the issue with Oracle's over's Hurd's hiring. When Hurd was named Oracle co-president on September 6 and given a seat on the board of directors, HP filed suit against Oracle and Hurd claiming that taking up the post would violate trade secrets and confidentiality agreements. While the terms of the settlement arrangement were not disclosed, the companies said Hurd will "adhere to his obligations to protect HP's confidential information while fulfilling his responsibilities at Oracle."
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2010
