As senior vice president of the Server Technologies Division of Oracle Corporation, Gerald Held is responsible for development and delivery of Oracle's data server and decision support products, which are designed to lower an organization's computing costs, manage all types of data, and deliver faster information access to all kinds of users. Held is a member of the board of directors at CommerceNet and the Tech Museum of Innovation. He also serves on the Executive Council at the Fisher Center for Information Technology and Management in the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Held began his career working on advanced technology at the David Sarnoff Labs and after six years there joined Tandem Computer. He remained at Tandem for 18 years and served as the chief technology officer and senior vice president of corporate strategy. He was a member of the Tandem Executive Committee and directed numerous senior business and development efforts, including the design of Tandem's original relational data base products, "NonStop SQL."

Held received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Purdue in 1970, his master's in system engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley, he was the architect of the INGRES relational database management system. He is also a graduate of the Stanford Business School's Executive Management Program.