Former Intel President Joins Oracle as Independent Director

Renee James, who was one of the top executive in Intel Corp. joined Oracle as one of the members of the company's board of directors. Mrs. James was a close aide of Andy Grove, the Intel CEO who led the company to a successful 1990's.

According to official release by Oracle, the company's Board of Directors has unanimously elected Renée James to the company's Board of Directors. The election is effective as of December 16, 2015 and increases the size of the Board to 13 directors. Prior to join Oracle, Mrs. James was an executive in Intel Corp.

The latest position she held before leaving Intel in July was a president of Intel, a number 2 position under CEO Brian Krzanich, which she held since 2013. She had been with Intel since 1987 when Mrs. James joined the chip maker as a product manager, During her long career in Intel, she was often responsible for leading Intel strategic relations with partner companies, including Oracle.

Business Insider reported Intel and Oracle have long been close partners and James was often a speaker at Oracle's annual customer conference. So it's not surprising that she was asked to join Oracle's board. In her latest speech as Intel president at the 2014 Oracle Openworld Conference, Mrs. James talked about the future of the Data Center in a software-defined world, emphasizing the collaboration between Intel hardware with Oracle in cloud infrastructure.

During her tenure in Intel, she had been through the success of Intel in the PC era in 1990's and early 2000's and faced a challenge of mobile revolution, that resulted in declining revenue of Intel. As a result, the company had to lay-off thousands of employees in 2014 to prepare Intel entering the mobile arena. Intel former CEO Andy Grove describe Renee James as "bullheaded, impatient and very smart."

As reported by The Wall Street Transcript, Oracle founder and Chairman of the Board, Larry Ellison welcomed James to the Board of Directors. "We are pleased to have Renée join our Board as an independent director," said Ellison. "She will bring a unique perspective and tremendous depth of experience and knowledge of the technology industry to our Board."

Oracle is a software company with focus on delivering the enterprise software products surrounding its well-known Oracle database system as its main product. Larry Ellison founded the company in 1977 as Software Development Laboratories in Santa Clara, California. The company was renamed into Oracle in five years later to align itself with its database management system product with the same name, which will become the company's flagship product.

With Renee James now serves as one of its Director, Oracle expects to utilize her experience in order to push more Oracles product to the cloud market.