Hurd In The Hot Seat

Oracle Co-CEO Mark Hurd touched on topics ranging from Oracle's cloud transition to its biggest rivals during a question-and-answer session delivered in front of members of the press at Oracle's Media Day on May 4 at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif.

Hurd gamely fielded most questions, especially those that allowed him some shots at competitors. The one area in which he ducked prodding was politics, both declining to share his impressions of the Trump administration and keeping mum on co-CEO Safra Catz' involvement in advising the new president.

But Hurd wasn't shy when discussing Oracle's cloud strategy, and sizing up the competition, including hyper-scale heavyweights Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft. For good measure, he threw in his two cents about SAP, Salesforce, and Workday and offered a not-entirely-enthusiastic take on the startup landscape.

Hurd also recounted a discussion with Steve Jobs in which the late Apple CEO compared the duties of executives in the consumer and enterprise tech businesses.

Here are some highlights from that discussion.