Ellison & 7 Other Tech Lions Still Roaring

10 New Side Projects For Larry Ellison

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What do Larry Ellison, John Chambers, Dave Duffield, Jim Goodnight, Sandy Kurtzig, Hasso Plattner, Mark Templeton, and Joe Tucci have in common? Not one of them is retired.

As we reported last week, Oracle's co-founder Larry Ellison is not really "stepping down," as many news outlets misreported; he's really stepping up. Oracle press releases and executives never used the word "retirement." Yes, Ellison is giving up the CEO title, but he has long been above the fray of day-to-day corporate operational management.

Safra Catz, newly named co-CEO, will continue to manage Oracle's finances, and Mark Hurd, the other co-CEO, will continue to manage all sales and service operations. Otherwise, "there will actually be no changes whatsoever" in Oracle's leadership structure, Catz noted. Ellison will continue to set the company's strategy as Executive Chairman, and he'll continue to direct all product engineering "exactly as I have in the past," he explained.

[Want the facts, not the me-too misreporting? Read Oracle Leader Ellison Is Not 'Stepping Down'.]

This non-retirement puts us in mind of a few other tech industry elder statesmen who haven't exactly "stepped down." Some, like Ellison, have backed away from the day-to-day stuff, but several of these 60-plus and 70-plus executives are still CEOs, and all of them are still actively involved in running their companies.

Here, then, is a roundup of tech sexagenarian and septuagenarians, in addition to Ellison, who are still going strong.

John Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco. Chambers, 65, said in 2012 that he expected to retire within two to four years, but the chief of Cisco has yet to name an heir apparent among likely candidates including sales president Robert Lloyd, field operations SVP Chuck Robbins, and services SVP Edzard Overbeek. After stints at IBM and Wang Laboratories, Chambers joined Cisco in 1991 and was named CEO in 1995. He added the Chairman title in 2006, and it would be no surprise to see him retain that position even if he steps down as CEO.

IT elder statesmen, from left, John Chambers, Dave Duffield, Larry Ellison, and Jim Goodnight.

Dave Duffield, Chairman, Workday. Duffield, 73, stepped down as co-CEO of Workday in May, but he's still chairman and continues to be involved in the company's education and government businesses and development of the Workday Student application. Duffield could have retired after selling PeopleSoft, the company he co-founded in 1987, to Oracle in 2005. Instead that same year he co-founded Workday with Aneel Bhusri (now sole CEO) and helped build it into one of the hottest cloud-based application vendors in the industry.

Jim Goodnight, CEO, SAS. Goodnight, 71, is "not the retiring type," CMO Jim Davis told InformationWeek back in 2011. Goodnight co-founded SAS Institute in 1976. Long among the largest privately held software companies in the world, SAS had $3 billion in revenue in 2013. Generous employee benefits

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