HP and Former CEO Mark Hurd Settle Suit Over Oracle Employment

Less than two weeks after suing former CEO Mark Hurd for taking a job with Oracle, Hewlett-Packard says the two sides have put their differences behind them and settled outside of court.

The terms of the settlement are confidential, according to an HP spokesperson. HP said today that Hurd, now co-president of Oracle, has agreed to "adhere to his obligations to protect HP's confidential information while fulfilling his responsibilities at Oracle." But an SEC filing today gives away the real resolution: Hurd agreed to return some of the stock he was granted while still employed by HP.

The SEC filing notes that Hurd waived his rights to 346,030 restricted stock units, some of them performance-related, others time-based, granted to him in January 2008 and December 2009.

Legal experts noted at the time that the tone of HP's suit suggested what the company really was after in suing Hurd was the handsome compensation package he received when he left, rather than actually trying to keep him from going to work.

Hurd walked away from HP with a package reportedly worth up to $40 million. He joined Oracle as co-president in early September and was sued by HP the following day for breach of contract and "threatened misappropriation of trade secrets." In other words, HP contended that by the nature of Hurd's work at Oracle he would invariably leak the company's trade secrets, which he had promised to protect in a confidentiality agreement with his former employer.

Hurd went ahead and took the job anyway, appearing last week on Oracle's first quarter 2011 earnings call, and on stage this morning at OpenWorld.