Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd has died from an undisclosed illness. He was only 62 years old. Hurd had stepped down from his CEO role at Oracle on September 11, just prior to Oracle’s annual Open World conference. Hurd was previously CEO of HP prior to going to Oracle. 

Hurd was a key proponent and driver of Oracle’s move to the cloud. He was passionate in how this is a key transformational time for Oracle and for business:

We have a big existing on-premise user base and I believe all of them will move (to the cloud). In fact, I was with a large group of our users just last night and they’re all going to move on their time frame. We don’t put a time frame on it, but this thing is moving at a pretty good speed. It will not move linearly, it will move geometrically. When we get to a certain point you will start to see a geometric move in the market and it will be significant.

The applications market is about $125 billion per year. That is spent primarily on applications and most of it today is spent on on-premise applications. That market changes pretty significantly as it moves to cloud.

”There is a couple of phenomena going on at the same time. The applications market is about $125 billion per year. That is spent primarily on applications and most of it today is spent on on-premise applications. That market changes pretty significantly as it moves to cloud. As it moves to cloud, the subscription that you pay for the cloud includes not only the application but includes all of the hardware, the servers, and storage. It becomes a bigger market just by the very nature of the migration of the application to SAAS.

When you ask who’s moving (to the cloud), it’s really everybody from the biggest guys, whether those be as big as an AT&T all the way to your smaller startup.

Our strategy is to lead the applications market as it moves to the cloud and lead the movement of database technology as it moves to the cloud. I think our strategy is irrefutable. That said, almost everything in our company is at some stage in transition, moving from the old model to the new model. The company is going to grow its revenue and applications is just one example of that.