Oracle Corp. co-CEO Mark Hurd died early Friday morning, weeks after taking a medical leave. He was 62.
“It is with a profound sense of sadness and loss that I tell everyone here at Oracle that Mark Hurd passed away early this morning,” Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison told employees in an email. “Mark was my close and irreplaceable friend, and trusted colleague. Oracle has lost a brilliant and beloved leader who personally touched the lives of so many of us during his decade at Oracle.”
Hurd is survived by his wife, Paula Kaluza, and two adult daughters. The California software giant announced he was taking medical leave on Sept. 11. The company did not disclose the reasons behind the leave, and his cause of death has not been disclosed.
Hurd's death comes nearly three months after Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee met with Oracle senior executives, including Hurd, regarding the potential opening of a large Oracle office in Nashville.
The Nashville Business Journal previously reported that an Oracle hub could involve 1,000 jobs initially, and potentially thousands more in the future. Oracle is on the hunt for at least 500,000 square feet of office space in Music City, with the possibility to as much as double that foot print, according to multiple real estate sources.
It is not clear whether Nashville is a finalist for the office hub, if Oracle has gone as far as selecting Nashville as the city where it wants to expand, or whether or how Hurd's death may impact the company's growth plans.
Safra Catz, Oracle's co-CEO and former chief financial officer, currently stands alone in the top post. Ellison told analysts prior to Hurd's death that he would recommend two Oracle executives as possible contenders to take Hurd's co-CEO post: Steve Miranda, executive vice president of Oracle Applications product development, and Don Johnson, vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure product development.
Hurd joined Oracle in September 2010, a month after he resigned from Hewlett-Packard.
He was credited with leading a revival in HP’s computer and printer sales, boosting profits with aggressive cost-cutting and executing the integration of Compaq into HP, a deal that his predecessor had been heavily criticized for making. Hurd "pulled off one of the great rescue missions in American corporate history, refocusing the strife-ridden company and leading it to five years of revenue gains and a stock that soared 130 percent,” The New York Times wrote in 2011.