Oracle brushes off HP Itanium lawsuit as 'publicity stunt'

HP's decision to sue Oracle has been called a "publicity stunt" and "an abuse of the judicial process" in a court filing from Oracle on Wednesday.

HP launched a lawsuit against Oracle earlier this month after it announced the end to its database software for Intel's Itanium processors, which are the power source for HP servers.

Oracle said that the lawsuit is a ploy by HP to escape blame from customers for selling outdated products.

"This case is a broader campaign to lay the blame on Oracle for the disruption that will occur when HP's Itanium-based server business comes to an end," Oracle claimed in the filing.

"HP has put itself and thousands of customers out on the end of a very long limb because HP, almost alone now, clings to a decades-old microprocessor architecture - Intel's Itanium chip line - that has no future. Now HP is suing Oracle for the temerity to tell customers the truth."

Oracle also denied that a contract signed between the two firms, which promised to maintain a version of the database software for the Itanium processor, had existed.

"Such an important contract, if it existed, would obviously be a heavily negotiated, fully documented, formal contract, with terms and conditions and all the other characteristics of real-world commercial agreements. But there is no such agreement," the filing said.

Oracle insisted that the comments it made nine months ago, while making up with HP after another public lawsuit between the two companies, should not be considered contractual.

"No sophisticated corporation would ever secure a supposedly life-or-death software support commitment with two fuzzy sentences that primarily deal with an employment dispute," said Oracle.

HP initiated a law suit against Oracle last year for appointing its former chief executive Mark Hurd as Oracle co-president. Shortly afterwards, the two firms engaged in a "corporate hug" and made a joint statement, which appears to be the sentences to which Oracle is referring.

"This agreement also reaffirms HP and Oracle's commitment to delivering the best products and solutions to their more than 140,000 shared customers," it read.

Oracle is also involved in a legal battle with Google, in which it wants up to $2.6bn from the search firm for alleged infringements of its Java software in the Android operating system.