Oracle's Mark Hurd Discusses the Shifting Global Market, Integration and Security

With some 11,000 staff, a $12 billion R&D budget over the past four years and one of the largest footprints of applications and technology in the vendor space, Mark Hurd sees plenty of positives in his company's ability to provide technology to the financial services industry.

Speaking this morning at the Oracle Financial Services Forum in New York, Hurd, president of Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle discussed where his company is going and what the future holds for the financial services industry. In his 45-minute presentation, Hurd touched on a number of topics, from growth and mobility to integration and security. The following are a few excerpts from Hurd's keynote and Q&A.

On growth in global markets:

"You want to to be somewhere interesting in the next 30-40 years? It's going to be the E-7… that's China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey. That's where the growth is. That's going to be where more GDP growth occurs than in what we think of today as the G-7. It's a big change in where wealth, where the money's going to be. And even if you're not doing business in Indonesia, you're going to have companies that do."

On mobility:

"In one year and twelve days there will be more connected phones than people."

On working with customers:

"We've got to get to market right. For us to get to market, we've got to make it easy to do business with Oracle. And that's a major objective. We actually have a strategy to grow, we have a strategy to sell more. Sometimes I have to repeat that several times so everybody gets that. And we need to make it easy for customers to do that with us, and make customers feel happy about that and feel they can trust us to help them do business."

On integration:

"I want to be careful about messaging that everything isn't about everything being vertically integrated at every turn. We are comfortable operating in a non-vertical environment, if that's what the customer chooses. But that said we'll certainly look for opportunities to vertically integrate. For me, I think the leverage of the stack - provided we have best of breed piece parts - the leverage of the stack when it can bring that exponential performance is a huge competitive advantages. First of all nobody has all of the piece parts of the stack that we do. I don't know that anyone's got the engineering capability to get that level of integration that we do. And so when you see more of it, we feel good about that. But we don't want to make it exclusive."

On security:

"I think it's getting more and more play. The sophistication of the attacks obviously is increasing exponentially. The number of attacks is increasing exponentially. I get a kick out of people who tell me I better secure my network because people want my network, I better secure my PC because people want my PC. I've got news for you: They don't want your PC, they don't want your network. They want your data. They want your information. It starts at the data level. Being able to secure your data is a big deal. I think we all in the industry have a role to play to get the level of sophistication up.

"The problem going on, particularly since this is such a U.S.-centric audience, is that with open nature of our society, our information systems reflect the society. And as you try to secure your data. It's in the very nature of innovation going on right now with this mobility and this marketing. For example, if someone says to you, 'Why don't we throw some innovation around our e-commerce site? Why don't we integrate our e-commerce site with some social networking site?' I can tell you, in some cases for companies, 90 to 95 percent of the attacks that they get emanate from two places: an e-commerce site or a social networking site. So that innovation. That very nature of these secular trends are simultaneously bringing growth opportunities for all of us that we have to pursue are actually simultaneously increasing the vulnerability that we have. And so for us, it's very important that we not only bring you an encrypted database, but give you a series of tools in our security suite that help you secure that data. So you're going to see a tremendous amount of energy from us around the security space. Up and down the stack."