In its latest statement, Oracle reiterated its belief that Intel will phase out Itanium in favor of x86, and that HP is doing customers a disservice by saying otherwise.
Oracle officials continue to insist that Intel is phasing out its Itanium
platform and are criticizing Hewlett-Packard for saying otherwise.
Oracle's
statement is the latest shot in a back-and-forth that began March 22 when the
giant software maker said it will no longer develop
software for Itanium processors. In the brief statement, company officials
said they made the decision after several meetings with Intel managers, who
told them that the company's focus was on their x86-base Xeon processors.
Intel
and HP quickly fired back at Oracle, with both claiming an Itanium road map
that stretches out at least a decade, and with the next two generations-code-named
"Poulson" and "Kittson"-already in development.
HP
also accused Oracle of cynically sacrificing customers for the sake of gaining
a competitive edge against its server rivals. Oracle entered the server field
last year when it bought Sun Microsystems for about $7.4 billion and inherited
its SPARC/Solaris hardware business.
"Oracle
continues to show a pattern of anti-customer behavior as they move to shore up
their failing Sun server business," David Donatelli, executive vice
president and general manager of HP's Enterprise Servers, Storage and
Networking business, said in a statement. "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."
However,
in a response March 23, an Oracle spokesperson said it was his company that is
looking out for customers by giving them significant advanced notice and by
letting them know their position on the future of Itanium. Oracle also has said
it will continue to support existing customers that run their software on
Itanium systems.
"HP
is well aware that Intel's future direction is focused on x86 and that plans to
replace Itanium with x86 are already in place," the Oracle spokesperson
said in the statement. "HP is knowingly withholding this information from
our joint Itanium customers. While new versions of Oracle software will
not run on Itanium, we will support existing Oracle/Itanium customers on
existing Oracle products."
Oracle
is the third major software vendor-joining Microsoft and Red Hat-in the past
two years to end support for Itanium.
Itanium
is a high-end platform that Intel sells primarily to HP, which uses it in its
Integrity and NonStop systems. Forrester
Research analyst Richard Fichera estimates that as much as half of HP's
high-end Superdome systems that have been sold are running Oracle database
software.
HP
officials also have said they will support Oracle customers that are running
their software on HP systems.
Fichera
said both Microsoft-with its SQL Server database software-and IBM
and its Power systems and DB2 database offering could benefit from the
confusion caused by Oracle's decision regarding Itanium. HP also could easily
port its HP-UX operating system to its x86 systems and build an x86 version of
the Superdome server, he said.
Oracle's
decision should not impact HP customers in the short term, though some will see
their options shrink and their budgets grow a bit.
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