Oracle To Continue Itanium Server Support For HP

Oracle Corp said it would continue to support Hewlett-Packard Co’s Itanium-based servers after it lost a bitter lawsuit in which it had argued that it was not obliged to make new versions of database software compatible with the servers.

Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger declined to comment when asked if the company still intended to appeal the court’s ruling. Oracle said on August 1, the day of the ruling that it planned to appeal.

The high-stakes dispute between the two companies, which have been partners for the past 30 years and have about 140,000 common customers, came after the former friends became intense rivals following Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems.

Oracle’s purchase meant that the company was now into the server hardware field, in which it previously partnered with HP.

Oracle had argued that there had been no contract with HP that required it to continue to support HP’s servers based on Intel Corp’s Itanium chips and that it had made the decision as Itanium was approaching the end of its life.

But Santa Clara Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg ruled that there had been a contract.

Oracle software on HP’s Itanium computers will be released about the same time as Oracle software on IBM’s Power systems, Oracle said in a statement.