Microsoft Taps 17-Year Oracle Sales Veteran As New VP Of Enterprise Partnerships

Stephen Boyle, a longtime Oracle executive in charge of the vendor’s alliances with software and hardware vendors, has left for a position at Microsoft, CRN has learned.

Boyle is now vice president of enterprise partners at Microsoft, a spokesperson for the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant confirmed to CRN on Monday.

Mark Hill, an 8-year Microsoft veteran who had held this role since 2009, is now vice president of Microsoft’s worldwide Commercial Software Initiative (CSI), a group that’s responsible for articulating how Microsoft both collaborates and competes with open source software.

The Microsoft spokesperson said Boyle joined Microsoft recently but could not provide a specific time frame.

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[Related: It's Official: Microsoft Taps 17-Year Vet Guthrie To Head Cloud And Enterprise Unit ]

Boyle had been Oracle's vice president of ISV and OEM alliances since 2010, a role that involves building strategic partnerships with large system integrators and ISVs. An Oracle spokesperson declined to confirm that Boyle is no longer an employee or comment on his departure.

Boyle joined Oracle in 1997 as a sales manager for ISV alliances in the U.K. after spending the previous 5 years at Sun Microsystems as a global account manager, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Boyle follows in the footsteps of former Oracle channel chief Judson Althoff, who joined Microsoft last March as president of North America sales and marketing, reporting to COO Kevin Turner.

Oracle has been trying to improve its relationships with channel partners and has made a number of key hires to oversee these efforts. But Mitch Breen, a longtime EMC executive who joined Oracle as senior vice president of North America sales last June, left for a job at SimpliVity, a converged infrastructure startup, in January.

At the time, Oracle partners spoke of growing friction between Oracle's hardware and software teams, with one partner describing the situation as a "civil war, although not so civil."