When Oracle announced plans to dump support for the Itanium microprocessor last year, it was inundated with hundreds of complaints from customers who found themselves using soon-to-be-obsolete servers built by Hewlett-Packard.
Now, thanks to HP's legal team, you can find about 150 of these complaints online, complete with names, job titles, company names, email addresses, and, in a few cases, even mobile phone numbers belonging to the unhappy customers. The spreadsheet was filed on March 27 by HP's attorneys as part of the ongoing legal battle between HP and Oracle over the Itanium processor.
Oracle still supports Itanium, but it is no longer porting new software -- most importantly the upcoming 12c database -- to the platform. HP sued Oracle last year saying that it is contractually obliged to do the port.
In the ugly dispute, the customer has often been collateral damage. In fact, that's one of the themes that has emerged in the HP v. Oracle lawsuit, which is being tried in California's Santa Clara Superior Court this week.
Oracle has borne the brunt of the customer outrage to date, and that plays out in the spreadsheet, which was originally emailed within Oracle by Christophe Lucet, a European Oracle employee who manages customer relations. He sent it to his boss, Oracle Chief Customer Officer Jeb Dasteel to let him know about unhappy customers, writing: "Naturally, this whole thing has been a massive distraction. HP have been very aggressive in terms of bombarding customers with communication and this is causing lots of Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt amongst customers which we can do without."
In fact, that was HP's stated strategy, which HP server chief David Donatelli summed up in a March 28 email as "customer outrage first."
It worked. Sort of. Sales of Itanium systems dropped 23 percent over the past year, but customers are plenty mad at Oracle. The spreadsheet is peppered with complaints of anti-competitive or unfair business practices, with customers seeing the Itanium move as a strong-arm tactic to force them to buy Oracle's recently acquired Sparc-based servers.
"Oracle's announcement that it will no longer support the Itanium chip strikes me as an act of desperation," writes an ERP manager with Bio-Rad Laboratories. "As an Oracle customer I'm sure it's designed to force me into buying Sparc, but will have in fact the opposite effect. This seems like an anti-competitive act to [shore] up a failing product line."
"It seems more like unfair business practices to pull support for Oracle on Itanium," wrote one systems administrator with Abbott laboratories.
A list of disgruntled Oracle customers who use HP's hardware would be pretty useful to a competitor such as IBM, which makes its own database, called DB2, along with its own server hardware. In fact, DB2 still supports HP's Itanium servers.
HP entered the information into the court record to make a point in the trial, and Santa Clara Superior Court records are not only available to the public, they can be found on the web. "The list reflects customers who wrote to Oracle to express their outrage at Oracle's anti-customer behavior by cutting off support for Itanium," says HP Spokesman Michael Thacker. "The list shows the impact to customers, and evidences Oracle's desire to move customers off Itanium and to Sun platforms."
It's not clear whether HP's legal team tried to redact the customer contact information. But the judge in the case, James Kleinberg, "made it clear that the only items he would allow under seal were items around future product information or items around sensitive financial information from Intel," says Thacker.
If Judge Kleinberg, refused to seal the customer information, that was probably a mistake, says Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law.
If HP never actually asked to have it redacted, that was a "little sloppy" on the part of the company's legal team, he adds. "The litigants are expected to redact confidential information in the documents they file," he says. "Normally, the parties are overzealous about redaction, so it's rarer to see an issue where confidential information leaked out."
Either way, customers are the big losers.
