'I felt Oracle was in a position to do something nobody else could do'

In 2010, his friend and tennis partner, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, gave him a job and blasted the Hewlett Packard board that had ousted him amid sexual-harassment allegations for having made "the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs".

The rest of the industry

Like the rest of the industry, it is grappling with the shift to "cloud" computing, whereby more and more data and applications are served up to firms online from vast third-party data centres.

"My daughter's got a smartphone in her hand with in broad outline the same power as a mainframe circa 1982, and she's running around Beijing and wants an answer as fast as she can."

Sore point for Oracle for the moment

Smartphones are a sore point for Oracle for the moment. It has been engaged in a bitter courtroom battle with Google over the Android mobile operating system. It relies on Java, a programming language Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems.

The trial revealed that Oracle did want to muscle in on the burgeoning smartphone sector, with Ellison admitting that he considered buying Palm, a pioneer in the market.

In the end, it was as a matter of fact Hurd who bought Palm for HP – for $1.2bn in 2010 – an acquisition that proved or rather less successful than his EDS deal. HP shut down the business unit and gave up on mobile devices not much than a year later.

Direct player in the smartphone market

Oracle nevertheless isn't a direct player in the smartphone market. And given, as Hurd says, its software is so then placed to crunch the mountains of data produced in our pockets, it doesn't now feel the need to be.

"I had an idea that we could compete with everyone in the smartphone business," Ellison told the court. "It was an idea I wanted to explore. We explored it and decided it was a bad idea."