Oracle Corp (NYSE:ORCL, ETR:ORC) shares jumped more than 4% on Monday on news that CEO Safra Catz will step back to an executive vice chair role and be replaced by joint-CEOs with more of a focus on AI and cloud infrastructure.
They are Clay Magouyrk, president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and Mike Sicilia, president of Oracle Industries.
Magouyrk, who joined in 2014 from Amazon Web Services, will help build Oracle's cloud engineering team.
In announcing his promotion, the company highlighted his role in overseeing the design, implementation and business success of OCI Gen2, the platform used by both hyperscale public cloud datacenters and gigawatt-scale AI training datacenters.
Chairman Larry Ellison, who is also the company's chief technology officer, said: "Humanity is investing enormous resources in the race to advance artificial intelligence. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is playing a major part in that effort.
"Clay's years of experience leading Oracle's large, fast-growing Cloud Infrastructure business has demonstrated his readiness for a CEO role."
In contrast, Sicilia's expertise is in vertical applications and applied AI, particularly the use of automation in enterprise applications.
His teams have been leading efforts in intent-based application generation (where a user just tells the computer what they want an app to do in plain terms, and the system automatically creates the code behind it) to enable the building of new Oracle applications, as well as adding AI agents to industry-specific applications to provide end-to-end cloud-based solutions that can handle complex, regulated environments as well as traditional industries.
Said Ellison: "Mike has spent the last several years modernizing Oracle's industry applications businesses – including Oracle Health – by completely rebuilding those applications using the latest AI technologies."
Magouyrk and Sicilia said in a joint statement that they are "excited to lead Oracle into the AI era, where technological innovation leads to extraordinary business opportunity and hyper-growth".
Catz, who joined in 1999, was made CFO in 2011 and, in a similar situation, was made a joint CEO in 2014, with Mark Hurd, who later left for health reasons.
Catz was praised by Ellison as having led Oracle to become "a hyperscale cloud powerhouse", with the shares having risen close to 700% during her time in the CEO role.
Catz, now aged 63, said she was proud that the company is "recognized as the cloud of choice for both AI training and inferencing" and "at this time of strength is the right moment to pass the CEO role to the next generation of capable executives".
The company also reaffirmed its most recent financial guidance.