Marc Benioff: This Is ‘The Biggest Mistake’ Oracle’s Mark Hurd ‘Ever Made’

January 12, 2014 Leave a comment

Marc Benioff: This Is ‘The Biggest Mistake’ Oracle’s Mark Hurd ‘Ever Made’

JULIE BORT 

JAN. 9, 2014, 1:53 PM 7,685 

Even though Salesforce.com signed a huge contract last summer to keep using Oracle’s products, and there was a public kiss-and-make-up session between Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and his mentor, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the two companies are still big rivals.That was never more clear than in the remarks Benioff made to a group of reporters Wednesday evening, following a one-day Salesforce.com roadshow event in New York.

Benioff set a 2013 goal for himself of closing more deals with large enterprise companies, reports InformationWeek’s Doug Henschen. He wanted to hire Oracle’s top sales guy, Keith Block, and had tried to recruit him for 10 years, Benioff said.

“But I couldn’t get him until [Oracle president] Mark Hurd relieved him of his duties … I think the biggest mistake Mark Hurd ever made was letting Keith Block leave Oracle, because he’s probably the best sales executives the enterprise software industry has ever seen.”

Block actually didn’t join Salesforce until he had been gone from Oracle for about a year. Sources close to Oracle tell us that Hurd wasn’t the only one involved in the decision to let him go.

Block left Oracle after a controversial bunch of instant messages and e-mails from him surfaced during a lawsuit between Oracle and HP.

In the messages, Block bashed Sun hardware, saying things like “We bought a dog. Mark wants us to sell the dog. … Nobody wants to sell Sun.” In another exchange, he bashed Hurd for creating “lots of noise, not much results.”, according to MarketWatch.

Meanwhile, Oracle has been struggling to find growth under Hurd’s plans to revamp. Also, Salesforce.com has gotten tight with HP.

HP has become a big Salesforce.com customer and, more recently, a partner. The two have jointly created a project called the Superpod, in which large global companies can use Salesforce.com’s cloud on HP hardware in a private area of Salesforce’s data center.

Oracle declined to comment.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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