A jury has awarded $3 billion damages to Oracle, which the company has decided to appeal.
Oracle’s spokeswoman has disclosed that a California jury has ordered the company to pay to pay Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co $3 billion in damages in a case related to Hewlett-Packard’s Itanium servers. The company will appeal this verdict.
In 2011, Oracle had decided to stop developing software for Hewlett-Packard’s Itanium based servers since Intel, the producer of Itanium chips, had made it amply clear that the chip was nearing the end of its life and that it would now shift its focus on x86 processors.
HP had an iron clad agreement with Oracle, which stated that Oracle’s support to its Itanium based servers will continue as the processor is central to its server equipment.
In 2012, in the trial that ensued, Judge James Kleinberg of Santa Clara’s Superior Court ruled that there was an agreement to which Oracle had to abide by. The jury has now decided the damages.
“HP is gratified by the jury’s verdict, which affirms what HP has always known and the evidence overwhelmingly showed,” said John Schultz, executive vice president and HP’s general counsel. He went on to add that Oracle’s decision to stop further software development for the Itanium processor “was a clear breach of contract.”
Dorian Daley, Oracle’s general counsel has said that since Kleinberg’s ruling, the company has been providing all of its latest software for Itanium servers.
He went on to add, “Now that both trials have concluded, we intend to appeal both today’s ruling and the prior ruling”.
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