Is someone chopping onions? Oracle cloud boss bids colleagues emotional farewell

Oracle's cloud guru Thomas Kurian has reportedly taken extended leave from the firm.

Kurian, who has been with Big Red since 1996 and leads a team of 35,000 engineers across 35 countries, told colleagues the news in an email.

"By now many of you may have heard that I have decided to take extended time off from Oracle," he said.

The departure, first reported by CNBC but published in full by Business Insider, is billed as being temporary, but the tone of the email sounds more like a permanent goodbye.

"I am so very proud of all that we have accomplished together and so grateful for having had the opportunity to help you on that journey," the email is quoted as saying.

"I shall never forget you, and I wish each of you the very best for the future."

Kurian, who was once tipped for a leadership role at Oracle, has been responsible for the company's shift to the cloud, and picked out this team for special thanks.

"I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have worked with me and our development team to help transform our market position as we transition from an on-premise product company to a Cloud-based Services organization," he wrote.

Kurian is one of five execs named in the City of Sunrise Firefighters' Pension Fund's lawsuit against Oracle, which alleges the firm overstated the success of its cloud business revenue.

Although Big Red has reported boosts in cloud revenues over the past few years, it recently decided to bundle together figures for SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, and for cloud and on-prem licences.

It claimed this was due to a shift to a bring-your-own-licence model and customers' increasingly hybrid approach – but the move was widely seen as a tactic to obfuscate its progress in the cloud.

Oracle declined to comment. ®