“Oracle has lost a brilliant and beloved leader who personally touched the lives of so many of us during his decade at Oracle,” Ellison said in a statement posted on Hurd’s personal website.
Oracle declined to comment beyond the statement. The company did not disclose the details of why Hurd went on medical leave, nor the cause of his death.
It’s possible some shareholders might be critical that Oracle didn’t disclose more information regarding the extent of Hurd’s illness, David Larcker, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor who specializes in issues of corporate governance, said in an email. But this is “a very hard governance problem, because the board has to balance the shareholder ‘right to know’ with the personal privacy issues,” Larcker said.
Hurd previously led Hewlett-Packard, including when the company’s media leak investigation spiraled into a spying scandal in 2006. He stepped down from HP in 2010 amid allegations of sexual harassment and falsified expense reports. Hurd denied the allegations at the time.
The company said that its investigation ultimately cleared Hurd of the sexual harassment charges but that he had violated HP’s conduct standards. Reuters reported at the time that HP found Hurd had filed inaccurate expense reports to conceal a “close personal relationship.”
Later that year, Ellison named Hurd and Catz as co-presidents of Oracle. In 2014, when Ellison stepped down as CEO, he named the pair to replace him. Ellison described Hurd in the statement Friday as a close friend and trusted colleague.
Hurd’s death is the latest setback in what has been a difficult few years for Oracle. As the company transitions from traditional enterprise products to cloud computing, it has struggled to match competitors such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
In July, the Pentagon issued a strong rebuke of the company, accusing it of using “poorly-informed and often manipulative speculation” in a dispute over a $10 billion cloud-computing contract. A federal judge ruled against Oracle’s attempt to stop the bid process. Oracle had argued that the contract should be broken into smaller contracts instead of lumped into one large procurement.
The contract was scheduled to be awarded in August but was delayed after Oracle, among others, complained. The Pentagon has not yet said when it will award the contract.
Hurd’s website says he grew up in New York City and Miami, and became a competitive tennis player in high school. He attended Baylor University on a tennis scholarship and graduated in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. He later became a member of the university’s board of regents.
In addition to leading HP and Oracle, Hurd previously was CEO of NCR, which makes ATMs and other business devices.
Hurd is survived by his wife and two daughters.