UPDATED 12:29 EDT / DECEMBER 01 2011

HP and Oracle Still Arguing over Intel’s Itanium Chip

The legal battle between HP and Oracle continues to run over Intel’s Itanium Chip, as the deadline for a key filing from Oracle is fast approaching on Friday. This hearing is in tune with complaints and claims made by Oracle, as it believed that HP engaged in fraud by not telling Oracle that it was about to hire Léo Apotheker as its CEO and Ray Lane as its chairman, when it was negotiating a settlement to a 2010 lawsuit over Oracle’s hiring of former HP CEO Mark Hurd. In this hearing, Oracle will give its reasons of taking decision of not developing Intel Itanium chips, and to stop building software that runs on servers using Intel’s Itanium chip.  HP says this was not only justified, but doesn’t violate any part of the agreement reached last year between Oracle and HP.

HP says that a clause in the settlement included a provision that Oracle would continue to port its database software to HP servers running the Itanium chip. On the other hand, Oracle has argued that this clause is not part of the final agreement.

This battle between HP and Oracle has put Intel in the middle of a debate that’s more about its chipset than HP’s and Oracle’s feelings for each other. Oracle is making some serious accusations claiming Hewlett-Packard has a secret agreement with Intel to keep the latter from shutting down its Itanium line.

Here’s what PCWorld picked up a part of Oracle’s filing:

“HP’s strategy behind its “false statements” about Intel’s support for Itanium was to take away business from Oracle Sun, and “reap lucrative revenues from the locked-in Itanium customer base using HP’s HP-UX operating system on Itanium servers”, as the company gets few service contracts on operating systems like Linux that run on x86 processors, Oracle said.”

In fact, all this goes several months back, when 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.

Whatever the case, the debacle is further deteriorating HP’s image, as the company is suffering from the ongoing uncertainty in the marketplace over its Itanium-based servers and other products.


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