"When I left HP, I thought about sitting it out for a while," Hurd said at the FireGlobal conference in Seattle. He said he received calls from companies in bad shape that wanted him to join and help turn them around.

"That didn't really motivate me," he said.

Oracle, which he thought "strategically was in such great shape," asked him on board to align its operations and make sure its strategy gets executed, he said. That would put him in a different position than he'd been in before and looked like a great opportunity, he said.

Oracle's strong intellectual property was also a draw. "It is the IP that truly attracted me," he said.

Hurd didn't otherwise speak about the scandal that led to his resignation from HP in August, following . Shortly after he resigned, at Oracle, one of HP's biggest rivals.