Hurd makes brief return to the spotlight

Ousted HP chief executive Mark Hurd has stepped back onto centre stage at the Oracle OpenWorld conference this morning, offering the same level of bravado as his new boss Larry Ellison in a short keynote speech.

Hurd, pushed from HP in August over allegations of sexual harassment, made his first public appearance two weeks after being appointed Oracle's co-president.  

Rushing on stage to announce the latest version of the Oracle/Sun Exadata database machine, a nervously energetic Hurd opened his speech with one word: "Listen..."

Hurd went on to summarise the problems many enterprises experience with data warehouses - namely the scale of data and user requests and the speed with which users seek to gain access to specific data.

The beefier Exadata X2-8, he said, offered two 64-core Intel EX servers, 2TB of memory, the choice of Oracle Enterprise Linux or Solaris, and database encryption, he said.

Oracle would take orders from today and begin shipping before the end of the year.

With several of these details previewed the night earlier during Ellison's keynote, Hurd was left little to announce.

"Not bad for two weeks on the job, huh?" said Oracle's Jon Fowler, as Hurd made a hasty exit.