Mark Hurd, the chief executive officer of HP that helped to transform the company into the world's largest supplier of personal computers, has joined Oracle, the company that nowadays directly competes against both IBM and HP with its own business-oriented hardware and software.

"Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he'll do even better at Oracle. There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark. Oracle's future is engineering complete and integrated hardware and software systems for the enterprise. Mark pioneered the integration of hardware with software when Teradata was a part of NCR," said Larry Ellison, chief executive officer of Oracle.

Mark V. Hurd has joined Oracle as president and has been named to Oracle's doard of directors. Mr. Hurd will report to Oracle chief executive officer Larry Ellison.

Earlier this year Oracle became the owner of Sun Microsystems and can now offer both hardware and software. Not only Sun Solaris and UltraSPARC technologies already compete against Intel Itanium and HP UX and Sun servers rival against HP servers, but it looks like under Mr. Hurd's execution the competition will intensigy.

"I believe Oracle's strategy of combining software with hardware will enable Oracle to beat IBM in both enterprise servers and storage. Exadata is just the beginning. We have some exciting new systems we are going to announce later this month at Oracle OpenWorld. I'm excited to be a part of the most innovative technology team in the IT industry," said Mark Hurd.

Tags: HP, Oracle, IBM, Dell