Safra A. Catz is the CEO of Oracle Corporation. She is also a member of the Oracle Board of Directors. Catz has held several positions at Oracle, including President and Chief Financial Officer. She also teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Catz is the chair of the Oracle Education Foundation board, where she has been a member since 2000. She also serves on the Board of Trustees of In-Q-Tel. Before joining Oracle, Catz was the Managing Director at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. She has served on the boards of HSBC Holdings and The Walt Disney Company.
Safra Catz was born in Israel. She is now a U.S. citizen. She has worked at Oracle since 1999. Catz has made significant contributions to the company's growth, including overseeing the large acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005. She is the highest-paid woman CEO in the United States and has transformed the tech industry. Catz's academic background has shaped her successful business career. She graduated from the Wharton School in 1983 with a BSc in Business Administration, majoring in finance. She then earned a Juris Doctor (JD) from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1986. This education prepared her for legal and corporate governance issues throughout her career.
Safra Catz is a long-serving and influential employee at Oracle Corporation. She joined Oracle in 1999. She became Executive Vice President in 2001. From 2004 to 2014, she served as President. She was also CFO from 2005 to 2014 and again from 2016 to 2017. Catz served as Co-CEO at Oracle from 2014 to 2019. She became the CEO of Oracle in January 2019. Outside her work at Oracle, Catz has been on The Walt Disney Company's Board of Directors since February 2018. She was a Non-Executive Director at HSBC Holdings from February 2008 to February 2015, which strengthened her influence in several industries.
Oracle Corporation has been progressively integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its business operations and product offerings over the years.
AI for Customer Experience: Oracle AI for CX integrates traditional and generative AI technologies to empower marketing, sales, and service teams to make interactions with customers quicker and more effective. This is how it enables organizations to customize and fine-tune engagement strategies and predict customer needs while ensuring personalized service delivery through the automation of mundane procedures and freeing up teams to focus on growing the business and further improving customer satisfaction.
Generative AI Capabilities to Oracle Fusion Cloud: The Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite is loaded with new generative AI capabilities, which ensure decision-making is better and makes a lot of improvements in employee and customer experiences. These abilities will thus be integrated into the various workflows of all the functions and allow customers to make use of generative AI for productivity and cost reduction as well as a deeper understanding specific to their industry.
Oracle AI Agents: Oracle has introduced new generative AI capabilities within the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite. It would enable improved decision-making and enhance employee and customer experiences. It is similarly embedded in current workflows within each function; this way, customers will seamlessly take advantage of generative AI to enhance productivity, lower costs, and unlock deeper insights relevant to their industry.
AI for Fusion Data Intelligence: Oracle has introduced new generative AI capabilities within the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite. It would enable improved decision-making and enhance employee and customer experiences. It is similarly embedded in current workflows within each function; this way, customers will seamlessly take advantage of generative AI to enhance productivity, lower costs, and unlock deeper insights relevant to their industry.
Oracle AI for Human Capital Management: Oracle AI for HCM harnesses the strengths of traditional as well as generative AI to make task completions better, improve decision-making, and enhancement of experiences by employees. It streamlines the HR processes around hiring, talent management, career development, and service delivery while safeguarding sensitive proprietary information involved within these processes.
AI for Enterprise Data: Oracle Database 23ai is the newest release from Oracle: the first ever with AI natively integrated with data and more than 300 innovations in it, including AI Vector Search. It streamlines the usage of AI, speeds up app development, and, through real-time AI in databases, makes security easier. Available on OCI, Exadata, and Azure, this is a huge leap forward for mission-critical workloads.
Partnerships: Oracle said it signed deals with OpenAI and Google Cloud to back AI workflow and further add to its multi-cloud strategy. Oracle is building data centres running on Nvidia chips to assist more in the training of AI models. Oracle said it won over AI contracts worth $12 billion and that the company's cloud services, as well as its infrastructure, have reportedly had huge revenue growths. The firm will quicken the addition of cloud capacity to keep pace with increasing demand during fiscal year 2025.
Investments in AI and Cloud Computing: Oracle has invested over US$6.5 billion in Malaysia in the development of a public cloud region that will boost AI and cloud infrastructure for local businesses. More than 150 cloud services, including generative AI capabilities, will be available to let Malaysian organizations modernize applications while securing data. This supports the digital growth of Malaysia in line with its New Industrial Master Plan, or NIMP, which will position the country as a tech hub. NVIDIA will make available its AI services to accelerate AI innovation in Malaysia.
As of October 2024, the real-time net worth of Safra Catz is estimated at $2.1 billion, placing her among the world's wealthiest individuals. In June 2020, Catz and her husband, Gal Tirosh, contributed $250,000 to President Trump’s fundraising efforts.
Safra Catz joined Oracle in 1999 and quickly ascended to key leadership roles. She became Executive Vice President in 2001, served as President from 2004 to 2014, and held the position of Chief Financial Officer from 2005 to 2014, with a second term in 2016-2017. Catz was Co-CEO from 2014 to 2019 before assuming the role of CEO in January 2019.
NetSuite Acquisition: Oracle recently filed a lawsuit against its cofounder Larry Ellison and Safra Catz, accusing the two of issuing misleading information concerning overpayment on the $9.3 billion acquisition of NetSuite. The allegations assert that Catz had provided false information to negotiations, disclosed Oracle’s planned share price to benefit Ellison who was a major shareholder more than the company, and questioned the board of directors’ honesty and loyalty.
Joining of Donald Trump's transition Team: Action triggered criticism in Oracle from its co-CEO Safra Catz who joined Donald Trump’s transition team in December 2016. George Polisner, Senior executive of Oracle opposed Catz’s stand on the president’s polarizing policies to tender his resignation publicly. His resignation brought out internal conflict at Oracle and people had questions regarding the corporate leadership’s position regarding affiliation to politics and their corporate social responsibilities.
Exiting Disney’s Board: Safra Catz, Oracle's CEO, recently resigned from Disney's board after six years, partly to avoid potential conflicts of interest linked to Oracle's chairman, Larry Ellison, financing a Paramount Global takeover. Her departure follows activist shareholder pressure and reflects ongoing concerns about corporate governance amid evolving industry dynamics.
Oracle’s CEO Safra Catz has resigned from Disney’s board of directors, partly to avoid potential conflicts of interest linked to Oracle’s chairman, Larry Ellison, funding a Paramount Global takeover. Her exit came as a result of pressure from an activist shareholder it and reveals sustained issues of corporate governance given changing trends in the industry.
Stepping Down of Larry Ellison: Safra Catz started facing controversy after rising to the position of the co-CEO of Oracle in 2014, together with Mark Hurd. The idea of having both a co-CEO arrangement created questions of efficiency, particularly in their so-called leadership structure after Hurd died in 2019. Also, Catz was an open supporter of Donald Trump which led to the resignation of an executive due to their political differences.