In a civil complaint filed in California Superior Court, HP said that Hurd would be putting the company's "most valuable trade secrets and confidential information in peril" by working at Oracle.

HP's suit said Hurd had been paid "millions of dollars in cash, stock and stock options" in exchange for agreeing to "protect HP's trade secrets and confidential information during his employment and following his departure."

"HP intends to enforce those agreements," the company said in a statement.

HP's suit charged that "in his new positions, Hurd will be in a situation in which he cannot perform his duties for Oracle without necessarily using and disclosing HP's trade secrets and confidential information to others."

HP asked the court to prevent Hurd from holding a position at a competing company.

Hurd, 53, resigned as HP's CEO last month after a sexual harassment probe uncovered subterfuge with company expenses.

The investigation found he had not broken harassment rules, but was in breach of HP's "standards of business conduct."

Hurd was named co-president of Oracle on Monday and also given a seat on the board of directors of the company.

"Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he'll do even better at Oracle," Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said in a statement. "There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark."

Oracle said the company's other co-president, Charles Phillips, was leaving the company and stepping down from the board.

Hurd said he was "excited to be a part of the most innovative technology team in the IT industry."

"I believe Oracle's strategy of combining software with hardware will enable Oracle to beat IBM in both enterprise servers and storage," he said.

HP shares fell 1.04 percent on Tuesday to close at 39.92 dollars while Oracle shares gained 5.87 percent to 24.26 dollars.

earlier related report
Former State Department official to head 'Google Ideas'
Washington (AFP) Sept 7, 2010 - A former State Department official credited with helping bring social networking and other Web 2.0 tools to US diplomacy has been tapped to head a new division at Google called "Google Ideas."

Jared Cohen, 28, left the State Department last week after four years on the Policy Planning staff, during which he was a leading advocate of using the Web to engage in what has been called "21st Century statecraft."

Cohen, in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine published on Tuesday, said that Google Ideas is "basically a think/do tank."

"Much of the model for it is built off of my experiences on the Policy Planning staff," he said, which he described as "the secretary of state's personal start-up."

"In the same way Policy Planning works by bringing together a lot of stakeholders in government, out of government, and across different sectors, so, too, will Google Ideas do something very similar," Cohen said.

"It's not designed to be, 'Let's pool all of Google's resources and tackle global challenges,'" the former State Department official told Foreign Policy.

Cohen said challenges Google Ideas may focus on include "hard challenges like counterterrorism, counterradicalization, and nonproliferation, to some of the ones people might expect it to focus on, like development and citizen empowerment.

"What I'm interested in is the SWAT-team model of building teams of stakeholders with different resources and perspectives to troubleshoot challenges," Cohen said.

Google already supports humanitarian causes through its philanthropic arm Google.org and various other initiatives such as "Project 10 to the 100th," a commitment to provide 10 million dollars in funding to five ideas submitted by the public.

While at the State Department, Cohen, who has more than 300,000 followers on microblogging service Twitter, also led delegations of technology executives to Iraq and other countries.

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