A chart from a 2009 HP internal presentation showing the declining fortunes of Itanium hardware.
Closing arguments for what promises to be just the first round of Hewlett-Packard’s legal war on Oracle occurred yesterday. HP’s lawyers asked a judge to rule that Oracle must continue to support HP’s Itanium-based Integrity servers for as long as the company continues to sell them. The case, filed last summer, is just the latest chapter in the long, sad story of Itanium. It's a processor manufactured by Intel under contract with Hewlett-Packard that seemingly no one else loves.
HP claimed that Oracle had made an agreement to continue producing versions of its database and application server products for Itanium as part of a settlement over Oracle’s hiring of former HP CEO Mark Hurd. Hurd is now Oracle’s president. He runs, among other things, Oracle’s Unix server business. And that competes directly with HP’s Itanium machines.
But Oracle’s move to drop Itanium development can hardly be seen as revenge—the move was recognition of cold, hard numbers. Oracle is just one in a series of software providers who have cut and run from the Itanium platform based on its anemic market performance. By going after Oracle for its alleged breach of agreement, HP has been forced to expose much of the hand-wringing at both HP and Intel over the future of Itanium.
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