Bengaluru :
Boy from Bengaluru, Thomas Kurian, 48, has been elevated as president of Oracle responsible for software development, making him perhaps the single most senior executive in the company after co-CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd. Kurian, who joined the $38-billion US company in 1996, was executive VP (product development).
Indians are now at top levels in many IT firms – the notable being Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and Sundar Pichai, head of most major Google products. A recent entrant is Bhaskar Ghosh, management committee member and group chief executive of technology delivery at Accenture.
Kurian is an alumnus of Bengaluru’s St Joseph’s Boys High School. He holds a BA in electrical engineering from Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude (highest distinction). He has an MBA from Stanford University where he was an Arjay Miller scholar. He has served as an advisory member on the boards of several international venture funds and software companies. In Oracle, he has held various product management and development positions.
An Oracle India spokesperson confirmed Kurian’s elevation, but did not respond to a question whether any other executive had been similarly promoted. On Oracle’s website, the highest designation among executives below the CEOs is executive vice-president. If no other executive has been promoted, then Kurian becomes the only president in the company.
Oracle chairman Larry Ellison wrote an email to employees to announce Kurian’s elevation. “I’m pleased to announce that Thomas Kurian has been promoted to president of Oracle, responsible for software development. He has a long track record of developing suites of software products that go to achieve pre-eminent success in the marketplace. His first major engineering effort was developing the Oracle suite of Fusion Middleware,” he wrote. Oracle Fusion Middleware is a business innovation platform for the enterprise and the cloud that enables enterprise to create and run applications maximizing IT efficiency.
Ellison, in his email to employees on Thursday, said Kurian was focusing on engineering products required to transition software technology to the Oracle Cloud. “The transition is going well with the Oracle cloud sales starting to take off…The world can get a glimpse of how well Thomas and his team are doing their job,” he said.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> Tech> Tech News / TNN / January 09th, 2015