After losing a bitter lawsuit with Hewlett Packard, Oracle says it will comply with a court order and start supporting HP's Itanium computers.
That means that the Oracle database 12c, expected at the beginning of next year, will run on Itanium.
"Oracle will continue building the latest versions of its database and other software covered by the judge's ruling to HP Itanium computers," Oracle said Tuesday in a statement. "Oracle software on HP's Itanium computers will be released on approximately the same schedule as Oracle software on IBM's Power systems."
Oracle develops its new software on Linux for x86 chips first, and then ports it to Windows and its own Solaris operating system. Support for Power and Itanium chips come after that.
Oracle and HP had once been great partners, but that all changed a few years ago when Oracle bought server vendor Sun Microsystems and HP gave former CEO Mark Hurd the boot. Soon, HP hired ex-SAP chief Léo Apotheker as its top executive, who further antagonized Oracle by acting like he wanted to fashion HP as a software company. Hurd is now president at Oracle, a job change that kicked off another lawsuit between the two companies.
In fact, HP and Oracle's Itanium lawsuit turned on a settlement agreement struck between the two companies to end the Mark Hurd lawsuit. Last month, the Santa Clara County judge overseeing the case, James Kleinberg, ruled that this agreement amounted to a commitment by Oracle to continue supporting Itanium until HP dumped the platform. The court is now figuring out how much HP is owed in damages in the case.
Once seen as a new industry standard processor for the data center, Intel's Itanium chip has been a flop in the market. HP is the only big server vendor to seriously support it. But Oracle's database is the most important application for HP's Itanium systems, and the company's March 2011 announcement that it was dumping Itanium angered customers and pushed many of them off of the platform.
Oracle is planning an appeal. But in the meantime, it's also planning an Itanium software update.
