UPDATED 09:12 EDT / JULY 01 2011

Oracle Calls Out HP in Court? More Like Calling the Kettle Black.

After Oracle Corporation’s acquisition of Pillar Data Systems, the company is now facing battles against Hewlett-Packard lawsuits, attacking the software company’s move to stop supporting the Intel’s Itanium processors as a “publicity stunt.”  Court documents found in PC’s World Business Center states; HP had a cunning plan to “lay blame on Oracle for disruption that will occur when HP’s Itanium-based server business inevitably comes to an end.”

Oracle decided in March to discontinue its support for Itanium, a heavy-duty computing microprocessor, saying Intel Corp made it clear that the chip was nearing to an end and the company’s focus was on its own x86 microprocessor.

“HP untenably has put itself and thousands of customers out on the end of a very long limb because HP, almost alone now, clings to a decades-old microprocessor architecture… that has no future,” the filing in a California superior court states.  “Intel has wanted to discontinue Itanium production for years, and HP knows it.”

According to HP, Oracle’s decision to stop supporting Itanium was a violation of commitments between companies and a part of a plan to force HP customers onto Oracle’s own hardware systems, which, according to Oracle, there was no such agreement.

“The core allegation in this case — which HP has aggressively sold to the press — is that HP has a contract with Oracle guaranteeing that Oracle will develop new versions of its flagship database product (and apparently everything else Oracle makes) to run on HP’s Itanium systems,” Oracle said in its filing.

“Such an important contract, if it existed, would obviously be a heavily negotiated, fully documented formal contract, with terms and conditions and payment obligations and all the other characteristics of real-world commercial agreements. But there is no such agreement for porting the Oracle database to Itanium.”

In addition to Oracle’s court battles, the company is also suing search engine giant, Google. Seeking out a cut of Android royalties based on Android’s use of Oracle-owned Java technology, Oracle’s case focuses on the utilization of the Java programming language in Android software. Java was developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired back in late 2009.

Oracle stated in their filing that “Oracle’s damages claims in this case are in billions of dollars.” It notes its claims “are based on both accepted methodology and a wealth of concrete evidence.”

On the other hand, Google denied the allegations in a filing made last June 27 through the U.S District Court in the Northern District of California, arguing that Cockburn’s statements are “unreliable and misleading”

“Cockburn has no basis for including all of Google’s revenue from Android phones into the base of his royalty calculation. The accused product here is the Android software platform, which Google does not sell (and Google does not receive and payment, fee, royalty, or other renumeration for its contributions to Android).

“Cockburn seems to be arguing that Google’s advertising revenue from, e.g., mobile searches on Android devices should be included in the royalty base as a convoyed sale, though he never articulates or supports this justification.” says Google legal counsel.


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