Christmas came early for Mark Hurd – the disgraced ex-CEO of HP – this year. Not only did he walk away with a hell of a nice kick in the ass from HP, that once is said and done could reach the $40 million mark, but he now has a sweet job offer from his good buddy Larry Ellison at Oracle.

How sweet?

Well if the Oracle offer letter that Hurd got, and posted by John Paczkowski at Digital Daily, Hurd stand to make almost a million dollars a year in salary alone. On top of that there is a target bonus of $10 million for fiscal 2011 and he has an option to buy up to 10 million shares of the company starting on the first board meeting following his hire.

Here is the offer letter in full

September 2, 2010
Dear Mark:

We are pleased to offer you the position of President, Worldwide Sales, Consulting, Marketing, & Support of Oracle Corporation (“Oracle”). You will be an employee of Oracle America Inc., reporting to Larry Ellison. We offer you a starting annual base salary of $950,000. In addition, you will be eligible for a bonus under the FY11 Executive Bonus Plan of $5,000,000 for 100% target achievement, and subject to an overall bonus cap of $10,000,000.

After you commence your employment, and subject to customary corporate actions, we expect that you will be nominated to stand for election to the Board of Directors of Oracle at the annual shareholder meeting on October 6, 2010. We will expect you to cooperate and take all necessary or otherwise desirable actions to facilitate that nomination and election.

Conditioned upon your acceptance of this offer and commencement of employment at Oracle, the Compensation Committee of the Board of Directors has given approval to grant you a stock option (“Option”) to purchase 10,000,000 shares of common stock at its first meeting following your hire date, consistent with Oracle’s practice. In addition, the Compensation Committee has also given approval to grant you an Option to purchase an additional 5,000,000 shares of common stock per year in each of the next five years (for an aggregate of 25,000,000 additional shares over the next five years) as part of Oracle’s annual corporate-wide option grant process, assuming you are still employed at Oracle in the same capacity on the date of each such annual grant. All Options are pursuant to the Amended and Restated Oracle Corporation 2000 Long-Term Equity Incentive Plan. The effective grant date of these additional Option grants will be the date the Compensation Committee approves the annual grant. Each Option will have an exercise price based upon Oracle’s stock price at the close of the market on the Option grant date. The Options will be issued under a written agreement and will be subject to qualification under all applicable securities regulations. As long as you remain continuously employed by Oracle or its affiliates, you will be eligible to exercise your right to purchase 25% of the Option shares per year; beginning one year after the Compensation Committee approves the applicable Option grant, subject to the terms of your written stock option agreement and your compliance with Oracle’s Insider Trading Policy.

You agree to comply with the Insider Trading restrictions applicable to Oracle Officers and Directors throughout your employment with Oracle and for one fiscal quarter following your separation from Oracle, regardless of the reason for your separation. Among other things, under these restrictions, you are prohibited from trading in Oracle securities during the last month of each fiscal quarter and until two full trading days following Oracle’s earnings announcement for that fiscal quarter. Notwithstanding the foregoing, your proposed Option referenced in this letter agreement shall be subject to the time limitations on exercise set forth in Section 6(i) of the Plan.

This offer of employment is contingent upon your satisfactory completion of Oracle’s pre-employment background screening process, which will include education and employment verification as well as a criminal records check.

To accept this offer, please sign below as well as the enclosed Employment Agreement and Mutual Agreement to Arbitrate, Proprietary Information Agreement, Data Privacy Agreement, and any remaining new hire documents and return them to Oracle, ATTN: Americas HRSSC, 1001 Sunset Boulevard, Rocklin, CA 95765 for delivery by September 12, 2010.

If you have any questions regarding the conditions of your offer, please do not hesitate to contact me at (XXX) XXX-XXXX. This offer remains open until September 12, 2010.

Sincerely,

/s/ Joyce Westerdahl
Joyce Westerdahl
Senior Vice President, Human Resources

See, it’s nice to have friends in high places.

Mark Hurd scores big with job offer from Oracle is a post from: The Inquisitr

I ran across this interesting post by Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher where he puts forward the idea that Oracle could possibly be making a play to acquire HP. Now given how right on Tom was with his prediction that Oracle would hire HP’s ex-CEO Mark Hurd; and with some of the information coming out today about a pending lawsuit from HP to stop Hurd’s hiring, one has to take a look at an acquisition scenario a little more seriously.

Now I would like to point out as well that Mark Hurd being hired by Oracle could also be the worst case situation for any of Oracle’s open source products that they picked up as part of the Sun acquisition. Given that HP’s R&D projects met more than one ax being wielded by Hurd during his tenure as CEO and that he is being hired as a move to improve Oracle’s bottom line this could spell bad times ahead for Oracle’s open source projects.

But back to Tom Foremski’s analysis around the the idea that Oracle could make a move to snap up HP his three points to support the idea are:

- HP remains leaderless and that makes it vulnerable to be acquired.

- HP would provide Oracle with enormous and highly profitable consolidation opportunities with its Sun Microsystems acquisition.

- An Oracle/Sun/HP plus the 45 plus other acquisitions over the past 10 years, would make a company capable of competing against all of IBM. It would create a West coast versus East coast tech rivalry that would span the globe.

One other piece of news that is just hitting the web that could also make this scenario a little more interesting is that HP is launching a lawsuit to stop Oracle from hiring Hurd. According to Business Insider

In the lawsuit against Hurd, HP says Hurd puts, “HP’s most valuable trade secrets and confidential information in peril,” by accepting the job of President at Oracle.

On its company blog, HP says, “Mark Hurd agreed to and signed agreements designed to protect HP’s trade secrets and confidential information. HP intends to enforce those agreements.”

This tech ménage à trois is just getting interesting.

Could Oracle make a play for HP? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Remember those fake scorned woman billboards that appeared in cities across America a few years ago addressing a cheating man named Steve from his wife Emily? (I paid for these from our joint checking account?)

Ya’Vaughnie (God, I hope someone prosecuted her parents for that) Wilkins may have been inspired by the viral stunt if her supposed act of retaliation against Oracle CEO Charles Phillips is any indication. The story broke on Gawker yesterday morning, with a post about the three billboards in central locations around Manhattan and their possible purpose. Who was YaVaughnie, and what was her relation to married with a young child Charles? Is YaVaughnie some corruption of “Yvonne”? These questioned needed answered, as they say in the midwest.

The billboards directed people to a website (soon crashed) showing the Oracle exec in a frickload of pictures with the clearly-not-his-wife woman, frolicking in states of undress on a boat and at several events. Subsequent digging by Gawker indicated the other woman and Phillips even owned property together. Phillips admitted in a statement yesterday that he did indeed have an affair with Wilkins, but that the pair “wished each other well” and the affair was no longer.

So why does she have him on blast? Unless the person behind the campaign is… his wife? We still don’t know. Here’s what Phillips said yesterday:

“I had an 8½ year serious relationship with YaVaughnie Wilkins,” Phillips said in a statement provided to NBC Bay Area by an Oracle spokeswoman. “My divorce proceedings began in 2008. The relationship with Ms. Wilkins has since ended and we both wish each other well.”

Whoever bought the ad space isn’t playing, however. In addition to being prominently placed in expensive locations like Times Square, the billboards are also timed to coincide with an Oracle event that is huge for the company:

What’s more, these billboards seem calculated to sabotage a major Oracle event Phillips will likely be speaking at: On January 27th (The same day Apple will or will not unveil the tablet), Oracle will host an “all-day live event” at its headquarters following the announcement that the EU has approved Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Devious!

Ouch. It’s assumed the party or parties responsible will be revealed eventually, but as of now the mystery billboard benefactor remains masked.

Oracle CEO Charles Phillips shamed into admitting affair with YaVaughnie Wilkins is a post from: The Inquisitr

The ZFS filesystem which was being used by developers at Apple for a possible future update to the Snow Leopard OS or future OS X systems has been stopped indefinitely according to an official statement by MacOS Forge.

The statement couldn’t be anymore clear:

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

While many rumors about the reasons for the work stop have surfaced, there’s speculation that the purchase of Sun by Oracle added to those issues. Oracle owns their own filesystem (BTRFS) which is still under development and which would have competed against the ZFS system. While ZFS has also faced patent issues that could have potentially led to lawsuits and other development issues down the road. [AppleInsider]

ZFS File System Development For Future Snow Leopard OS Update “Discontinued” is a post from: The Inquisitr

Oracle’s Sun Acquisition

Oracle will pay about $7.1 billion for Sun. That comes out to $9.50 a share — more than IBM’s $9.40 a share offer last month. Altogether, the transaction is valued at $5.6 billion, taking into account various debts. Sun’s board has given unanimous approval for the deal. It still requires a shareholder sign-off, however, as well as regulatory approval to go through.

Oracle and Sun have been partners for more than 20 years, with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware being built on Sun’s Java protocol and its database business using Sun’s Solaris operating system.

Oracle execs believe the deal will add a minimum of 15 cents a share to the company’s earnings, a projected gain of $1.5 billion in the first year. Already, Sun’s shares were up 36 percent in premarket trading. Oracle’s shares dropped 4.5 percent, while IBM went down by only about 1 percent.

Oracle-Sun Acquisition Analysis

The following Bloomberg video features more analysis on the Oracle-Sun acquisition and what it could mean for the market.

Sorry, IBM: Oracle Buys Sun Microsystems is a post from: The Inquisitr

The products now licensed to run in the cloud on Amazon EC2 include the Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager. Existing software licenses gain access with no additional license fees.

From the Amazon Web Services blog:

These products, along with Oracle Enterprise Linux, are available in prepackaged, ready to run form, encapsulated within a set of free Amazon EC2 AMIs. Using these AMIs, new instances can be launched and ready within minutes. Of course, Oracle’s development tools — Oracle Application Express, Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, and Oracle Workshop for WebLogic — can all be used to build applications for this new environment.

What does this mean? Instead of budgeting for and acquiring hardware, setting it up, installing an operating system and several layers of complex packages, you can simply launch one of these AMIs on EC2 and be up and running in minutes. This is definitely no-fuss, no-muss application development and deployment.

Cisco will also offer a cloud-based backup solution called Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module, allowing customers to use Amazon S3 (as a database backup destination.

Amazon and Oracle team for cloud deal is a post from: The Inquisitr