(Bloomberg) — Oracle Corp (ORCL).’s longtime chief security officer, one of the highest ranking women in the cybersecurity industry, is leaving the company as part of a recent reorganization, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified to discuss a private matter.
Mary Ann Davidson, who joined Oracle in 1988 after serving as a civil engineer in the US Navy, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Bloomberg News reported last week that Oracle was cutting jobs as the company takes steps to control costs amid heavy spending on AI infrastructure.
Oracle didn’t provide a comment. In a June filing, the company said that day-to-day cybersecurity operations were overseen by Senior Vice President Robert Duhart, who previously was chief information security officer of Walmart Inc.
The news of Davidson’s departure came as a surprise to many in the security community given her nearly 40-year tenure at the company and her prominence in the industry as an advocate for the security of Oracle’s products.
Davidson was the subject of a 2003 Businessweek profile that described her rise from a product marketing job in Oracle’s financial software unit into the company’s secure systems division in 1993 and ultimately becoming the company’s first chief security officer. The profile described her as a surfing and skiing aficionado who telecommuted from the mountains of Ketchum, Idaho, for part of the year.
Davidson was long Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison’s right-hand person on security. In a 2002 interview with Businessweek, she described the challenges of making sure the company’s products lived up to a marketing campaign envisioned by Ellison that touted the company’s products as “unbreakable.”
“‘Unbreakable’ gives us something to live up to,” she said in the interview. “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.”
Davidson has long been a forceful advocate for the security of Oracle’s products, having overseen the development of industry-leading systems and processes for testing the company’s code for vulnerabilities and protecting the products from hackers.
But her confidence in those systems landed her in a controversy in 2015, when she published a surprising post on a personal blog admonishing customers for trying to find vulnerabilities in Oracle products on their own, violating their licensing agreements and ultimately, she said, wasting her team’s time in chasing what often turn out to be false positives. After an outcry from cybersecurity researchers, Oracle said it ordered the post removed as it “does not reflect our beliefs or our relationship with our customers.”
