Oracle Corp. says one of its top executives, Thomas Kurian, has resigned from the company, three weeks after saying he was taking “extended time off” from the database and business software giant.

“Mr. Kurian’s duties and responsibilities have been reassigned to other senior executives in Oracle’s development organization,” the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. The company added in a boilerplate statement that Kurian is leaving “to pursue other opportunities.”

Kurian, who was Oracle’s president of product development, was said to be leading the company’s efforts to expand its cloud computing business. Kurian was also regarded as the main technical leader at Oracle after Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison. Such was his seniority at the firm that he did not report to Oracle’s co-Chief Executives Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, but to Ellison himself.

In September, Kurian told employees via an email that he would be taking extended leave, and thanked them for helping to push the company’s cloud computing efforts. A spokesperson for Oracle later said Kurian was expected to return to his job soon.

Days afterward, however, Bloomberg ran a story saying that Kurian’s absence stemmed from a difference of opinion with Ellison over the role of cloud-based software in Oracle’s future. The report said the executives faced “growing strife” over the best strategy for Oracle’s cloud efforts. Kurian apparently insisted Oracle should make more of its software available to run on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp., the company’s main rivals, as a way of diversifying from its own cloud infrastructure. But Ellison reportedly disagreed with the plan, Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg’s theory was given credence by analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group, who told SiliconANGLE that Kurian’s departure was likely a kind of “old guard vs. new guard issue”, with Ellison representing the former and Kurian a part of the latter.

“Larry is largely stuck in the 1990s and god save anyone that wants to bring him into the current decade,” Enderle said. “He still believes strongly in lock-in, which does frankly work for Apple at the moment, but increasingly doesn’t work for more informed buyers like IT managers. I expect this won’t end well for Oracle, but this is another lesson that disagreeing with someone like Ellison at Oracle is a quick path to unemployment, regardless of whether you are right or wrong.”

Whatever the reasons for Kurian’s departure, it represents the biggest change in Oracle’s development organization this century, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE. He explained that Kurian was instrumental in putting together Oracle’s tech stack vision “from the chip in silicon all the way to the click in SaaS.”

“This was coming together quite well on the product side, but not so much on the revenue and customer side,” Mueller said.

Oracle now faces a big problem in finding someone to fill Kurian’s shoes, since there is no one who has the same experience and track record over such a large product portfolio that Kurian had, Mueller said.

“It is always possible for the next row of executives to step up, but this will be a big ask,” Mueller said. “Ellison and the board have a key role to fill now, and that will be hard as nobody is building a technology stack like Oracle’s, which needs to work seamlessly together and show superior total-cost-of-ownership qualities from the design and operational synergies.”

Kurian had served at Oracle in various capacities since joining the company in 1996 from McKinsey & Co. He had held his most recent position as president of product development since 2015, overseeing the creation of its Fusion middleware and business applications that have played a prominent role in the company’s transition to the cloud.

Oracle’s stock fell last month after cloud services revenue came in below analysts’ expectations in its second quarter.

Image: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE