The revolving door in Silicon Valley is still spinning.

On Monday, tech giant Oracle (ORCL) announced it had hired former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) chief executive Mark Hurd as one of its two presidents. Hurd will report to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

Hurd, who resigned from H-P on Aug. 6 following sexual harassment allegations, will replace Oracle co-president Charles Phillips, who stepped down about nine months after details emerged about his relationship with a former mistress that used huge billboards depicting their relationship. (Co-president Safra Catz will remain in her role.)

Oracle Investors appeared willing to look past the circumstances of Hurd's departure. By midday Tuesday, shares had risen more than 5%. The stock closed at $22.92 Friday.

As the world s third largest software developer, Oracle competes with H-P and International Business Machines (IBM). Analysts say Hurd s new position will allow Oracle to expand further into hardware and streamline its acquisitions.

Now is the right time for Oracle to bring on Hurd because once product integration has occurred, it should be focused on streamlining operations, says Trip Chowdhry, a senior analyst at Global Equities Research. Today, there is still a lot of overlap and Hurd is the ideal person to improve the corporate margin and get cost structure in line.

In January, Oracle finalized its $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems (), which sells computer software and information technology services. The buyout is expected to help the company move into the data-storage systems sector where H-P is currently present but Oracle is not.

With Hurd on the Oracle team, Sun could begin gaining marketshare from Cisco (CSCO), a competitor in this sector, Chowdhry says.

Also, in August, Oracle completed the acquisition of Phase Forward, which develops data management systems for the pharmaceutical industry.

Our research indicates that Oracle has 15,000 redundant employees, Chowdhry says. Hurd will need to help identify those overlaps and eliminate them to redeploy those resources to go against competition.

While at H-P, Hurd oversaw relatively successful acquisitions including 3Com (Electronic Data Systems), a networking company, and Electronic Data Systems ().

He showed he was good at acquisitions by increasing profitability and expanding businesses in which H-P worked, says Chowdhry. Based on previous decision-making, Oracle could see cost cutting in the form of layoffs following acquisitions, he says.

Oracle s swift decision to hire Hurd did little to assuage H-P investors concern that the company made a mistake in pressuring him to resign. Since Aug. 6, H-P shares have dropped 13% to close at $40.34 on Friday. Part of the stock's decline was the result of H-P's outbidding of Dell (DELL) for data-storage company 3PAR (PAR); analysts say the final offer had left the company overpriced.