Larry Ellison has stepped aside as chief executive at Oracle, handing the job to a pair of senior executives, Mark Hurd and Safra Catz. Ellison will remain as CTO of the company he founded in 1977. The news came as the company issued another set of disappointing financial results.

An Oracle statement explained that Hurd and Catz have been promoted to CEO (not co-CEOs) continuing the division of labour in their previous role as co-presidents of the firm. Catz was chief financial officer, taking care of finance, manufacturing and legal issues, while Hurd has been seeing to sales, services and vertical markets. Hurd was previously CEO of Hewlett-Packard until he was ousted from that role in 2010.

Management team remains
In a statement, Ellison said: "Safra and Mark will now report to the Oracle Board rather than to me. All the other reporting relationships will remain unchanged. The three of us have been working well together for the last several years, and we plan to continue working together for the foreseeable future. Keeping this management team in place has always been a top priority of mine."

Oracle gave no reason for the change, but the announcement came as the company issued the latest in a series of disappointing financial results, amid mounting questions about its hardware and software strategy.

Revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2015 was US$8.60bn, less than three percent up over a year ago, with net income for the quarter remaining more or less flat at $2 billion.

The heart of Oracle's business - on-premises software built around its database - is growing, but not as fast as it should, while its cloud business is also growing fast - but still provides only a very small proportion of its revenue (around 5 percent of sales).

The big trouble was hardware, which declined by seven percent, with services going down by the same amount. Oracle's hardware business was created when Ellison gambled on buying Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in 2009, with the idea of creating an integrated hardware and software business.

That model, unfortunately has been outmoded by cloud software and commodity hardware, so sales of Oracle's proprietary SPARC hardware have never justified the price paid for Sun.