On Thursday, a Silicon Valley jury ordered Oracle to pay Hewlett Packard Enterprise $3 billion in damages in a trial revolving around now-defunct Itanium technology. The damage to HP’s business was done if you were a tech buyer though.
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John Schultz, the executive vice president and general counsel of HP Enterprise, notes that his company is satisfied with the jury’s verdict. The processor failed to win industry-wide adoption, causing both HP and Intel to reduce their investment in it.
The case that began in 2011 was started by HP Enterprise (known only as Hewlett Packard, or HP at the time), when Oracle stopped porting database and other products to Itanium.
A California jury issued the judgment after a judge ruled in 2012 that Oracle had violated a contract with HP by stopping database software development for the servers. However, it had already violated the contract five years ago. Since it split in November from its sibling company, now HP, its shares have jumped about 10.4 per cent.
HP said that commitment was affirmed when it settled an earlier lawsuit over Oracle’s hiring of ousted HP chief executive Mark Hurd. It vowed to appeal the jury decision.
HP says Oracle broke an agreement to keep developing software for servers based on Intel’s Itanium chips, while Oracle had argued that Intel had made it clear in 2011 that it was phasing out the chip type and that it didn’t have a contract to keep developing the software forever.
The verdict ends a federal court trial in San Jose over a conflict between the companies stemming from Oracle’s decision to bail out of a pact to develop software for Intel’s Itanium chip.
Oracle chose to stop supporting Itanium systems running HP’s HP-UX operating system in 2011 after Intel made it clear that the chip was almost obsolete. However, Intel denied the assertion.
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.
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If the payout of $3 billion happens, Oracle will part with 5.6% of their cash reserves which now stands at approximately $56 billion, according to Bloomberg.
