Thomas Kurian quits Oracle

Thomas Kurian, President of Oracle Product Development has stepped down from his current position. Kurian joined Oracle in 1996 and was responsible for leading its transition to a cloud technology company and reporting directly to Oracle executive chairman of the board and chief technology officer Larry Ellison. He has spearheaded a team of 35,000 across 32 countries and developed products that generated USD 35 billion in annual revenues, including USD 5.5 billion cloud revenue for Oracle.

There is no report on what will be the next move of Kurian. However, Kurian said while leaving Oracle that he would like "to pursue other opportunities". According to Bloomberg, Kurian's departure was preceded by disagreements with Ellison over the company's cloud strategy. Kurian reportedly wanted to let more of Oracle's software run on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, while Ellison opposed that in favor of promoting Oracle's own infrastructure. Ellison favored a more “closed” approach based on the premise that Oracle Cloud is the optimal choice for Oracle workloads.

Kurian was the man behind the company’s shift to cloud and is responsible for leading software development at the firm. Under his leadership, the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products became the fastest-growing and the industry’s leading middleware product suite.

In early September, Kurian took an extended leave from the company and thanked his employees via an email for their contribution towards Oracle’s cloud efforts. He was expected to return shortly.

Oracle has not yet announced who will take over his role, though the filing said that his responsibilities has been “reassigned to other senior executives at Oracle.”

The stock market report says that Oracle’s cloud services failed to meet investor’s expectations following its first quarter fiscal 2019 earnings. It would be interesting to see what happens after his exit as the company continues to struggle to compete with AWS and Microsoft .