Former HP star Dave Donatelli has joined Oracle
Oracle has officially declined comment. But according to one of our sources, Donatelli has taken on an executive VP title in the hardware division reporting to his old boss, Mark Hurd.
Hurd is a former CEO of HP and is now CEO of Oracle, a role he shares with CEO Safra Catz.
Donatelli is a hardware specialist who spent 22 years at EMC before he joined HP. Hardware know-how is something that Oracle greatly needs. I's DNA is still a software company.
Still, Oracle's hardware business is doing fairly well recently, up 5% last quarter, when adjusting for the foreign exchange currency headwinds plaguing US multi-national corporations like Oracle.
It's not clear if Donatelli will be replacing someone or if he will be a new addition. But he is an interesting addition in the "Mark Hurd" camp.
There's some scuttlebutt that head of engineering, Thomas Kurian, who reports directly to CTO and executive chairman Larry Ellison, has a lot of influence in the company. Although Ellison stepped down from the CEO job, Ellison is still a power at Oracle and Kurian has his ear. Kurian was promoted in January.
As for Donatelli, he was he was running HP's $30 billion Enterprise Group until 2013, when Meg Whitman sidelined him. His division wasn't contributing fast enough to her turnaround plan for the company.
He was reassigned to the task of finding startups for HP to invest in, and was often working out of the offices of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz offices, rather than at HP's Palo Alto mothership headquarters, according to Re/Code's Arik Hesseldahl. (Marc Andreessen is an HP board member.)
Donatelli has been wanting to leave HP since at least February, 2014, when word leaked that he was interviewing around.
Still, it's tricky business for Oracle to hire major HP execs since the two companies are big competitors. When Oracle hired Hurd, HP sued. The two eventually settled the dispute.