HP blasts Oracle over Itanium decision

HP has criticised rival vendor Oracle over its decision to drop support for the Itanium processor.

Shortly after news broke of the decision, HP sent out a statement accusing Oracle of abandoning its customers and trying to limit competition for its server platforms.

"Oracle continues to show a pattern of anti-customer behaviour as they move to shore up their failing Sun server business," said Dave Donatelli, HP's vice president of enterprise servers, storage and networking.

"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."

HP said that it will continue to offer support for enterprises running Oracle software on its Itanium server platforms.

HP and Oracle have not exactly been staunch allies of late. Oracle chief Larry Ellison publically criticised HP's dismissal of chief executive Mark Hurd, who would later become president at Oracle.

The war of words continued when HP chose former SAP chief Léo Apotheker to replace Hurd.

In this case, however, HP's indignation over the move may be justified, say analysts. Forrester Research analyst Richard Fichera said that the Oracle decision poses a big problem for HP.

Fichera explained in a blog posting that the move could cut off a major section of HP's Itanium server business which is dependant on the Oracle database platform.

"All in all a very rough move on Oracle's part. Oracle claims that the move was not motivated by competitive issues with HP, and HP has been very vocal in decrying it as destructive and unfair to major enterprise Oracle customers," wrote Fichera.

"While it is always difficult to unravel the decision process of major shifts like this one, my gut feeling is that HP's claim probably has some merit."