Jury Slaps Oracle with $3B in Damages in HPE Itanium Case

Oracle must pay $3 billion to Hewlett Packard Enterprise in a lawsuit that debuted five years ago over the use of Itanium processors. It argues that the Itanium processor was clearly near the end of its life by 2011-Intel has not introduced any new models since November 2012-and that the contract never obligated the database firm to support HP’s Itanium systems indefinitely.

Oracle said it will appeal the verdict. The two companies were back in court some four years later to decide just what those damages should be.

Oracle unilaterally made a decision to drop support for Itanium systems running HP’s HP-UX operating system in 2011.

The row came about because Oracle reneged on a contractual agreement to continue making software that ran on high-end Itanium chips. While a Santa Clara Superior Court took note of the matter in 2012 and ordered Oracle to resume developing software for HP’s Itanium based business, HP claimed that the damage had already been done.

According to various reports from the likes of Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, a jury awarded HPE the full amount of damages over Oracle’s move to nix support for the chip.

“We very much appreciate the dedication and effort that the jury gave to this case for over 5 weeks of trial”, HPE general counsel John Schultz said in an email response to an AFP inquiry. Oracle feels strongly that it had no such commitment, while HP successfully argued the opposite, adding that its servers would be obsolete without Oracle’s support.

This time around, Oracle is in the crosshairs of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), one of two entities created after Hewlett Packard divided up its consumer and corporate businesses.

Oracle denied wrongdoing. Chairman, co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison testified that the company took action because he believed Intel had made a decision to stop supporting Itanium, which Intel denied.

Documents unveiled by Oracle showed that HP had paid Intel nearly $500 million (£321m) over several years to continue developing Itanium.

This is now the second legal setback for Oracle in the space of two months, after it lost its mammoth Android lawsuit against Google in late May. But HP’s due damages were not determined.