Oracle’s Chief Security Officer Mary Ann Davidson has left the company as part of its latest reorganization, according to Bloomberg. She is among the highest-ranking women in the cybersecurity space.
Oracle noted in a June filing that day-to-day cybersecurity operations are being overseen by Senior Vice President Robert Duhart. Duhart used to be the chief information security officer at Walmart before joining Oracle. Davidson’s departure comes a week after Oracle revealed it was conducting layoffs to control costs amid push for artificial intelligence infrastructure, the Bloomberg report said.
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Davidson joined Oracle in 1988 after working as a civil engineer in the U.S. Navy. While in the Navy as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy Civil Engineer Corps, she had received the Navy Achievement Medal.
During her years in Oracle, she has overseen development of the company’s industry-leading systems and processes that test its code for vulnerabilities and protect products from hackers. According to the Bloomberg report, her departure would have come as a shock to many, given her prominence in the security community and her advocacy for the security of Oracle’s products. According to her profile on the Oracle website, Davidson serves on the international board of the Information Systems Security Association, where she has been named to their Hall of Fame. She was also a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency. She has also testified on cybersecurity to a number of U.S. House and Senate committees.
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Davidson was known as the “right-hand” person of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, when it came to things related to security. In a 2002 interview with Businessweek, she spoke about the challenges of ensuring that Oracle’s products lived up to the “unbreakable” marketing campaign pushed by Ellison. “‘Unbreakable’ gives us something to live up to. It really does concentrate the mind wonderfully. The general thought is ‘don’t embarrass the company.’ Nobody wants to be the group that makes us violate it,” she stated. However, she was also embroiled in controversy in 2015 after she told off customers for trying to find vulnerabilities in Oracle’s products and violating their licensing agreements in her personal blog. This was widely criticized, and Oracle said it “does not reflect our beliefs or our relationship with our customers.”
Last week, Bloomberg reported that Oracle was laying off its staff in its cloud division. Sources familiar with the matter said some of the layoffs were linked to performance issues but noted that the division is still hiring even as the company works to control costs while investing heavily in AI infrastructure. “These types of restructurings have resulted, and may in the future result in increased restructuring costs and temporarily reduced productivity while employees adjust to the restructuring,” Oracle has stated in its June filing.