Oracle has named Clay Magouyrk, who led Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Mike Sicilia, who led Oracle Industries, co-CEOs as Safra Catz becomes Executive Vice Chair.
The company announced that changes in a statement and SEC filing.
Catz joined Oracle in 1999 as a senior vice president and was CFO in two different stints. In 2014, Catz became co-CEO with Mark Hurd when Larry Ellison stepped down to be CEO. In 2019, Catz became sole CEO after Hurd's death.
With Catz as CEO and Ellison as CTO, Oracle transformed itself into a leading cloud infrastructure company. Magouyrk, 39, joined Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in 2014 and was a founding engineer. He has led OCI's expansion into AI training and inference.
Sicilia, 54, joined Oracle via the acquisition of Primavera Systems and has led the company's vertical applications including the rebuild of Oracle Health, which was built via the acquisition of Cerner.
"At this time of strength is the right moment to pass the CEO role to the next generation of capable executives," said Catz, who also functionally served as CFO.
Now Magouyrk and Sicilia are co-CEOs Oracle the duo will split oversight of OCI and the AI applications that'll run on top of it. The co-CEOs will make their debut at Oracle AI World next month and an analyst day that will go along with it.
Ellison said on a conference call:
"I've never seen an opportunity on this scale before. The immense impact of AI across our economy is hard to grasp. The colossal size of the AI endeavor and the size of the responsibility that goes with it, it's difficult to imagine. But Oracle's job is not to imagine gigawatt scale data centers.
Oracle's job is to build them. Clay and Mike are proven successful leaders prepared and experienced in pursuing AI opportunities. I'm looking forward to working with Clay, Mike and Safra, over the coming years to develop AI technology and enable our customers to use large language models with their private data."
In a statement, Magouyrk and Sicilia said, "our combined strengths in AI, cloud infrastructure, horizontal applications and industry applications, will enable Oracle to deliver the latest AI capabilities to our customers."
On a call, Magouyrk added that Oracle's stack is really about integration.
"The whole is more than the sum of the parts. And I think that's true even within our infrastructure, the fact that our database services can then provide more and more value to the applications and then the fact that the applications themselves become more valuable when you can take advantage of multiples of those together. That really is the true strength of Oracle. We are the only company that can do both infrastructure and applications."
Sicilia said:
"Our customers are increasingly interested in and seeing value in all of our offerings, from industry applications, to Fusion, to OCI, to database and to our AI data platform. As we help businesses transform, this also creates much bigger deals that are multiple times larger than what we experienced in the past."
According to regulatory filings, Magouyrk and Sicilia will receive stock option grants on Sept. 24 with options to buy $250 million shares of Oracle common stock with 80% of the grant time-based and the remainder on performance.
Catz as Vice Chair will continue to work with Ellison. Ellison noted that he and Catz "will be able to continue our 26-year partnership."
Oracle reaffirmed its financial guidance. Since Catz was principal financial officer at Oracle, Douglas Kehring, executive vice president of operations since March 2015 will become CFO.
