Larry Ellison may have stepped down as CEO of Oracle Corp., but he’s still running things from behind the scenes.

Ellison, officially the third-richest man in the US after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, had just $2,000 when he co-founded Oracle in 1977. In just 27 years he’s presided over its transformation into a $182 billion database juggernaut thanks to his smart and often ruthless business acumen.

Now he’s heading ‘upstairs’, taking on the roles of Executive Chariman and Chief Technology Officer responsible for software and hardware engineering. In other words, Ellison’s still going to be very much involved with the company he gave birth to.

And just as when Bill Gates gave up the CEO role at Microsoft Corp., Ellison’s decision is unlikely to change anything much.

Oracle’s new joint CEOs Mark Hurd and Safra Catz will continue in much the same vein as before. Hurd will handle sales, services and marketing, while Catz will remain the company’s chief financial officer and oversee legal and manufacturing options.

That little will change was evidenced by Ellison’s own comments when he said: “Safra and Mark will now report to the Oracle board rather than to me. All the other reporting relationships will remain unchanged.”

In other words, the Oracle juggernaught will continue to trundle along as it’s always done, raking in billions of revenues, crushing the opposition.

Because Ellison will still be around to ensure that’s what happens. As several observors have noted, Ellison is highly unlikely to relinquish control over the company he founded.

“He’s still participating in the conference calls with investors and analysts,” said Wikibon’s Dave Vellante. “This looks to be succession planning, with Safra or Hurd in mind. That said, it’s highly unlikely Ellison will let go of major decisions concerning strategy, R&D or acquisition.”

Those sentiments were echoed by none other than Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com and a former Oracle sales executive, on Twitter:

“There always has been, and always will be, one CEO at Oracle,” tweeted Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

A superficial switch

So why did Ellison even bother stepping down? One possible reason is he simply wants a bit more free time. Ellison is well known for living the high life, with his love of fast cars, planes and yachts. It could be that he just wants to spend more time living it up on his tropical island retreat.

Then again, there’s the possibility this move is all about saving face. While Oracle is a money-printing machine, it has also been notoriously late to embrace the cloud. And Oracle’s investors aren’t entirely happy with Ellison’s excuses for that, especially when they think about the kind of money Ellison is being paid.

“Larry has been under huge pressure to do something,” said Ron Enderle, principal of tech research firm the Enderle Group, in an interview with SFGate. “He is the highest-paid person in the valley. The big investor groups were having a cow over how much he was making and how poorly Oracle was doing.”

So it might be that Ellison wants to be seen to do something, though in reality the move is just a superficial one. “I would argue he’s still hanging in there and not going anywhere; he just changed his title,” Enderle concluded.

photo credit: CalamityJon via photopin cc