Ousted HP CEO Named Co-President of Oracle

Talk about quick rebounds.

One month after resigning his position at Hewlett-Packard amid allegations of business-standard improprieties, ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd has a new gig: Co-president of Oracle.

Ending a long weekend’s worth of speculation, Oracle on Monday said Hurd will serve as co-president alongside Safra Catz, taking up a role vacated by current president and fellow scandal cultivator Charles Phillips, who has evidently resigned.

“Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he’ll do even better at Oracle,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in statement. “There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark.”

Indeed, Hurd’s knowledge of HP’s (HPQ) server and data-storage-systems business will undoubtedly come in handy at Oracle (ORCL), which has been aggressively moving into that very space ever since its acquisition of Sun. In that sense, Hurd’s hiring is a real coup for Oracle. Who better to put the screws to a rival than a former CEO with a bone to pick?

Perhaps that’s what Larry Ellison was thinking when he spanked HP for canning Hurd. “The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs  many years ago,” he said at the time. “That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn’t come back and saved them.”