After Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion last year, the competition between Oracle and HP has grown higher, culminating with Oracle naming former HP CEO Mark Hurd as co-president of the company during the infamous legal battle between Oracle and SAP.

Recently Oracle announced it would stop software development for Itanium microprocessors, which would in turn bring serious impediments for HP and its Itanium-based servers. HP accused Oracle of trying to bring down competitors through such radical measures. In reply, Oracle explained its position by claiming that Itanium is on the homestretch and there is no use in keeping it up. Oracle added that HP had not made any statement regarding plans for Itanium in a recent presentation on his company’s roadmap and went as further as accusing the company of withholding information from its Itanium customers.

“Oracle continues to show a pattern of anti-customer behavior as they move to shore up their failing Sun server business,” Dave Donatelli, an executive vice president at HP said in a press release. “We are shocked that Oracle would put enterprises and governments at risk while costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity in a shameless gambit to limit fair competition.”

Such sallies coming from senior companies are disappointing and would create the impression of a children’s quarrel, but when finding themselves on a war footing companies disregard professional manners.

The other days, Oracle announced it would have its earning calls for 2010 this week, one month before competitors. For the third quarter of 2010, Oracle’s profits rose to 54% a share, with sales having increased by 37% to $8.76 billion. Another company in this domain with positive results is Research in Motion that during the fourth quarter of 2010 delivered $934 million earnings and an average of $1.76 a share on revenue of $5.64 billion.