HP Sues Oracle Outright Over Itanium

HP and Oracle have been snapping at each other for months ever since the latter dropped Itanium support, and it looks like the conflict has finally gotten to the point of legal action, started by the former.

Users keeping track of the happenings on the server market might know of the tensions between HP and Oracle.

These strained relations started when Oracle announced it was dropping support for the Intel Itanium server processing platform.

Clients eventually did demand that the outfit reconsider, but this has not happened and does not look likely to occur in the future either.

Nevertheless, HP is not about to stop its attempts at remedying what it sees as an unfortunate course of events.

What happened was that HP filed a lawsuit against Oracle, in which it accuses the company of breaking “legally binding commitments” to key supporting workstations and servers powered by 64-bit pro hardware from Intel.

“HP believes that Oracle's March 22 statement to discontinue all future software development on the Itanium platform violates legally binding commitments Oracle has made to HP and the more than 140,000 shared HP-Oracle customers. Further, we believe that this is an unlawful attempt to force customers from HP Itanium platforms to Oracle's own platforms,” the outfit states.

As one would expect, Oracle retaliated quite quickly, stating that HP is deceiving customers in regards to the future of Itanium.

'We believe that HP specifically asked Oracle to guarantee long-term support for Itanium in the September of 2010 agreement because HP already knew all about Intel's plans to discontinue Itanium, and HP was concerned about what would happen when Oracle found out about that plan,” the statement reads.

“What we know for certain is that Ray Lane and HP's current board members and Leo Apotheker and HP's current management team now know full well that Intel has plans in place to end-of-life of the Itanium microprocessor. Knowing this, HP issued numerous public statements in an attempt mislead and deceive their customers and shareholders into believing that these plans to end-of-life Itanium do not exist. But they do. Intel's plans to end-of-life Itanium will be revealed in court now that HP has filed this utterly malicious and meritless lawsuit against Oracle.”