As Oracle and HP's lawsuit over the doomed Itanium chip drags on like some Dickensian subplot, it's time to introduce two new characters: Microsoft and Red Hat.
Both companies were served with subpoenas last Thursday by Oracle, which seems hell-bent on unearthing every embarrassing detail on Itanium and then flushing them into the public record.
On Monday, thanks to Oracle's lawyers, we learned that HP is paying close to $700 million to keep Intel cranking out its unpopular Unix superprocessor until 2017. Oracle is trying to make the case that HP's public act of pretending that people liked Itanium was not marketing but fraud. We'll leave that one for the courts to decide.
In the mean time, HP is fighting back with lots of disclosures about Oracle's aggressive sales technique. On Tuesday, we got to see court documents showing the extent to which Oracle saw its March 2011 decision to stop supporting its software on Itanium as a bonanza for the Oracle hardware sales group. These are the folks who promptly started making sales calls to a targeted list of more than 750 Itanium customers. From the court filings:
A senior Oracle hardware executive confirmed Oracle’s plans with respect to the sale of Sun server products with direct and vulgar language, writing that “hp is dead” because “we have a lot up our sleeve” and “we are going to fuck hp.”
So why did Microsoft and Red Hat get served? They're the two operating system providers most critical to the success of Itanium -- HP aside. Oracle may be wondering if HP cut them deals to keep them in the Itanium game. Neither Red Hat nor Microsoft could be reached immediately for comment. In court filings, Intel has called itself an "innocent bystander" in this dispute.
Finding all of these embarrassing tidbits isn't easy. In a court filling, Oracle says that it has produced about 400,000 documents so far, and that HP has coughed up about 350,000. Intel, whose participation in this trial we reported on two weeks ago, has produced "just over 1,000 documents but has made assurances that further productions are forthcoming on a rolling basis for several weeks," Oracle writes.
On tap in the coming weeks: depositions from Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd, and maybe depositions from Intel, Microsoft, and Red Hat executives too.
The trial is set to start on April 2, but don't book your tickets to San Jose just yet. HP has asked for a 45- to 60-day postponement to deal with the Dickensian -- or is it Sisyphean -- legal stuff.
