HP Bashes Oracle Again, Urges Customers to Demand Itanium Support

It looks like HP and Oracle are not nearly done dishing it out over how the latter suddenly announced it had stopped making software for the Intel Itanium server processor platform, with the newest episode having HP appealing to Oracle's customers.

Users involved in any way with the server industry may have learned that Oracle, not long ago, said it was dropping support for the Itanium chip platform.

This garnered a fairly intense reaction on the part of HP, who is, practically, the only major company still promoting Itanium.

In fact, HP went as far as to say it was shocked at the so-called 'shameless gambit' that Oracle pulled, stating that it would be years before Intel stopped making new generations of the chips.

Intel itself said it had no plans to stop developing next generation iterations of the chips, but the fact remains that Oracle is no longer making software for them, although it does plan to keep supporting those chips that already exist in its customers' installations.

Now, CRN web-site reports that HP is not willing to give up on calling Oracle out on what it sees as anticompetitive tactics.

Basically, the world's top supplier of computers has begun to urge the latter's customers to demand that it continue supporting Itanium mission-critical servers with new software.

"In a high market share area, this is a shameless attempt to force customers to spend a lot of money to move to a platform over time that gives customers no benefits. Oracle made this decision to slow Sun SPARC market losses," said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager for HP's enterprise servers, storage, and networking business.

HP sees Oracle's move as a means to coerce prospective customers into buying its own SPARC platform.

“We are asking you to rally around and ask Oracle to reverse this decision. Call or write - they have changed their minds in the past on issues, and we are asking you to rally to make this happen," Donatelly said.

"From my perspective, it's a rather clumsy attempt by Oracle to try and prop up a failing and deteriorating Sun server business. It is an anticompetitive decision, it is self interested and it is to the endangerment of customers," commented Leo Apotheker, the CEO of HP.