HP swipe at oracle
By Techgirl

Oracle and Hewlett Packard (HP) are among the biggest and most successful technology companies in the world.  Both have multi billion dollar Indian operations that play a pivotal role in their international success.

But it seems that Oracle and HP have now taken their business battles to a spiteful altercation.  At one level, it is about market share and business rivalry, at another it has become so personal that childish press releases are being issued to the business and tech media.  The genesis of this latest battle can be traced to HP sacking their CEO Mark Hurd after an ex-HP female contractor made allegations of inappropriate behaviour against Mr. Hurd.  Oracle quickly appointed Mr. Hurd as Co-President as he is widely credited for making tens of billions of dollars for HP.  HP sued Oracle for hiring Mr. Hurd and everything went downhill from there.
 
The latest skirmish between Oracle and HP is about supporting software for an Intel Chip.  HP sent the following press release to the media on March 23, 2011 which slams Oracle.  For some reason, HP thought it cannot make their point about chip giant Intel without pulling down Oracle

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HP Supports Customers Despite Oracle’s Anti-customer Actions

Amid plummeting SPARC server market share, Oracle seeks to force customers to buy their servers

HP today reiterated that it will continue the development and innovation of Itanium®-based Integrity server platforms with its HP-UX operating system using a roadmap that extends more than 10 years.

In addition, HP will continue to support customers running existing versions of Oracle software on Itanium-based Integrity servers, both existing and future platforms, during the same timeframe. Last year, HP launched the industry’s most modern mission-critical architecture in more than a decade. This constitutes the longest published roadmap of any UNIX vendor in the industry.

“Oracle continues to show a pattern of anti-customer behavior as they move to shore up their failing Sun server business,” said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP. “HP believes in fair and honest competition. Competition is good for customers, innovation and the marketplace. We are shocked that Oracle would put enterprises and governments at risk while costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity in a shameless gambit to limit fair competition.”

In a direct contradiction to a statement made yesterday by Oracle, Paul Otellini, president and chief executive officer, Intel Corporation said, “Intel’s work on Intel Itanium processors and platforms continues unabated with multiple generations of chips currently in development and on schedule. We remain firmly committed to delivering a competitive, multi-generational roadmap for HP-UX and other operating system customers that run the Itanium architecture.”

Poulson is Intel’s next-generation 32-nm, 8-core-based Itanium chip, and is on track to more than double the performance of the existing Tukwila architecture. Kittson is an officially committed roadmap product for Itanium beyond Poulson and also is in active development. Intel® Itanium processor industry momentum will be highlighted in a keynote at the upcoming Beijing Intel Developer’s Forum.

HP moved ahead into second position in the Unix market while Sun lost share and fell back into third since Oracle announced it would acquire Sun in April of 2009.(1) It is clear that Oracle customers are voting with their purchasing decisions against the Sun platform. This latest Oracle action of disinformation is clearly an attempt to force customers into purchasing Sun servers in a desperate move to slow their declining market share.
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Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog techgirltalk.blogspot.com.  Techgirl has been ejected from Twitter for satirizing an Indian Minister.  Her satire blog has links to her Times of India interview detailing her being kicked out of Twitter, and then being invited back.