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Diving briefs:
- Oracle has moved Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia to the board of directors, co-theo of C-Suite Reshuffle, former CEO Safra Catz to the board, serving as executive vice chair, according to a announcement Monday.
- A founding member of Oracle's Cloud Engineering Development Center, Magouyrk joined the company from AWS and served as president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for almost 12 years. Sicilia came to Oracle in 2008 when the company acquired Primavera Software and rose to President of Oracle Industries in June. The company announced that integration of Agent AI into the industry application suite is a priority.
- According to Larry Ellison, Oracle's CTO, board chair and co-founder, the move raises two pillars of the company's business strategy. “Clay's years of experience leads Oracle's large, rapidly growing cloud infrastructure business, demonstrating his preparation for the CEO role,” Ellison said in the announcement. “Mike has modernised Oracle's industry application business (including Oracle Health) over the past few years by using the latest AI technology to completely rebuild those applications.”
Dive Insights:
The leadership change comes amidst the aggressive data center build-out where Catz and Ellison attack shepherds as hyperschools compete to ease constraints on AI workload capacity.
In June 2024, Openai supplemented its Azure deployment with Oracle Infrastructure to train and host a large-scale language model. Almost a year later, Oracle deployed Openai's GPT-5 across its database and software services application suite, leveraging OpenAI generation AI tools for its e-health record business earlier this month.
The partnership is expanding to capital investments as well.
Oracle and Openai agreed to build a 4.5 gigawatt data center capacity as part of the federally approved Stargate Infrastructure Push in July, and signed a five-year agreement earlier this month for a $300 billion cloud service.
Partnerships are just one of the Levers that Oracle is leaning towards building cloud businesses.
The company said it added $10 billion earlier this month to the $25 billion it had already committed to capital investments for the current fiscal year in its first quarter of this year, which began on June 1.
“All this money you spend on training needs to be translated into the products that are on sale. This is all inference,” Ellison said over the phone, adding that the market for inference will ultimately overshadow the model training market.
Catz has been the center of Oracle's cloud expansion since becoming the company's sole CEO in 2014. Last year, Oracle secured a Multicloud agreement to house database servers for AWS, Microsoft and Google facilities. The executive touted the inflection point in the company's cloud expansion plan as the number of OCI regions exceeded 100 in March.
“Safra led Oracle when we became a hyperscale cloud powerhouse,” Ellison said in a announcement Monday.
The CO-CEO arrangement will bring Oracle's executive leadership alongside the growth drivers, Gartner VP analyst Balaji Abbatulla told CIO Dive in an email Monday.
“The change shows that Oracle, as an ecosystem-driven AI infrastructure provider led by experts in cloud infrastructure and industry ecosystem partnerships, is turning itself to investors, customers and business partners,” Abbabatulla said. “This is a way of Larry to unveil the next generation of Oracles without taking anything away from Safra's achievements.”
