What happens next Where's my refund? Best CD rates this month Shop and save 🤑
MONEY
Elections

Bartiromo: Oracle's Hurd is in tech sweet spot

Maria Bartiromo for USA TODAY
  • Oracle's Mark Hurd is front and center of data deluge
  • "Big Data" is big business for $100 billion behemoth
  • Refrigerators and oil rigs: The new frontier for tech?

Mark Hurd sits in the middle of the world's information flow. The former head of Hewlett-Packard landed on his feet two years ago at Oracle, where he has a front seat to watch the biggest grower of our time: data. As co-president of Oracle, the $100 billion behemoth that counts governments and large multinational enterprises among its biggest customers, Hurd is in a sweet spot for the changes happening in technology. Data, or so-called Big Data, has exploded from traditional computers and servers to unstructured and everyday places such as cameras, refrigerators, cars and oil rigs. I caught up with Hurd to find out what he's hearing from big customers spending money and what the onslaught of data means to the rest of us. Our interview follows, edited for clarity and length.

Q: Can you tell us about information technology managers today? What are they spending money on, and where are the economic challenges?

Mark Hurd, co-president of Oracle, listens to a presentation at the company's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, on Thursday, Oct. 4, 2012.

A: IT overall is going through yet another renaissance. Part of the issue is the sophistication of today's consumer. They are increasingly mobile and increasingly sophisticated. They want to be able to buy what they want when they want from wherever they want, however they want. That causes issues for our customers, which have a long set of legacy applications trying to serve their customers' needs. Where you see our customers spending money today is how they improve their customers' experience and how they promote their brands in this world of social media as well as traditional marketing programs. At the same time, budgets are tight. What most of our customers have today is both an austerity plan to save money and at the same time a plan to reapply that money to innovation. There isn't a customer we have that doesn't have an austerity plan and an innovation plan. The innovation plans are plans to get to their customers in a more effective way.

Q: Data have become more complex. What kinds of changes have you seen, and how have they dictated your strategy?

A: You're going to hear the term Big Data. It has a couple of meanings. One, just the scale of data is increasing, meaning there's just a lot more of it. Some expect data to grow on the planet by 20 times between 2012 and 2020. Just the sheer mass of data is going to grow exponentially. That is now coming from things you might think of as non-intelligent, but that will become intelligent, things like refrigerators, appliances and oil rigs with sensors that can start communicating real-time information back into an infrastructure. When you combine that with the fact that there is a lot of "unstructured data" — this could be voice, it could be a picture, all sorts of different types of data — the collection of that scale of data and those different data types, the challenge is, how do I deal with this massive amount of data and turn it into meaningful information? I now have lots of raw data; I've got to turn it into something that allows me to make the right decision as fast as possible. What Oracle's done is the ability to integrate that unstructured data with structured data to deal with the scale of that data, to integrate it simply and easily onto integrated computers that can live either on the cloud (off line) or on the premises.

Q: Can customers feel comfortable that their data are safe? If nothing is growing as fast as the flow of data, doesn't it need to be protected as well as organized?

A: Bad guys who are looking forward to getting your data are innovative, so it's important for us to be innovative around the areas of security. We try to help our customers protect data The core of where the data sit today is in the database. There's no one in the world who knows more about databases than Oracle. I don't think anybody can ever give you a blanket guarantee of anything, but what you can have is this guarantee: Oracle has the best minds in the industry working to make the data as secure as possible.

Q: Which industries in the economy are spending the most money right now?

A: Technology has changed a bit over the past several years because the consumer has now become a huge part of the overall spending, to where it now rivals the spending of enterprises. The industries that spend the most are manufacturing. But manufacturing is broken up into segments, such as automotive, and others. Financial services is still the largest spender of IT today. The other segment that spends quite a bit on IT is communications. Both of those sectors are very attractive to technology companies for one core reason: They are global, meaning that you can build a solution and deploy it many times. That's very attractive when you can build something once and deploy it many times. Core banking is roughly the same in the U.S. as it is in China or France. Getting dial tone in India is roughly the same as getting dial tone in Spain. As a result, the ability for IT, which roughly automates those processes, is very attractive in those two segments.

Q: Leadership is important in business. What happened at your former company, Hewlett-Packard, where you were CEO? The stock has lost half of its value in 2012, and the company recently forecast another tough period. How does a global behemoth fall so fast?

A: it's just best for me to focus on Oracle. I've been here now a couple of years, and we're very focused on our ability to grow Oracle and to improve its market position.

Q: Oracle, like many companies, is sitting on billions in cash right now. Does anything change after the election? Do you see anything loosening up in terms of business?

A: Stability is always good for the economy. I'd have to say hopefully with the election, we gain stability, and the ability to focus on growth in the economy. If that happens, it's going to be even better. There's no question to us a growth economy is better than not.

Q: What is the strategy for growth at Oracle?

A: We've got a fairly simple strategy. Offer customers best-of-breed technology at every level. Second, integrate those technologies into engineered systems where we do the work for the customer, make it simpler. Third, we are moving our application suite to the cloud with what we call fusion cloud applications. And fourth, we are focused on industries. That strategy manifests a whole suite of products that we've announced over the past ... year and a half, two years. As part of that strategy, we're spending 5 billion of (research and development) this year and rolling products out into that strategy. We think it's going to the core of this trend you see in IT, which is, how do I just make things simpler? How do I make it easier? How do I modernize it, standardize my IT infrastructure?

Bartiromo is anchor of CNBC's Closing Bell. To see previous One on One columns, go to bartiromo.usatoday.com.

Featured Weekly Ad