HP to Seek $4 Billion in Damages From Oracle Over Itanium
Hewlett-Packard and Oracle are beginning to outline the arguments they’ll be presenting next month when a jury trial starts in the second phase of their court dispute over Intel’s Itanium platform.
In a hearing earlier this month, HP officials indicated they planned to seek damages from Oracle of $4 billion or more, saying the software giant damaged its high-end server business when Oracle officials announced in 2011 that the company would no longer support the Itanium platform, saying that Intel was planning to end the chip line.
HP executives said Oracle’s decision was a cynical move to try to convince businesses to migrate from HP’s Itanium-based Integrity and NonStop systems to the SPARC/Solaris hardware that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2009. Oracle’s decision echoed similar moves by Microsoft and Red Hat to stop supporting Itanium.
