Opinion: The ugly Oracle-HP divorce - customers could get hurt
Divorce is never pretty.
That's what's going on now as Oracle and Hewlett-Packard toss verbal and legal Molotov cocktails over the future of Itanium and Oracle's decision not to develop new software to run on Intel's 64-bit processor. The two companies have about 140,000 joint customers, and they're scared, confused, and angry, says Nina Buik, the chief marketing officer of the 53,000-member Connect, an HP user group.
"Our members feel they are getting a raw deal in a squabble between two corporate giants," she tells me. More specifically, many of those 140,000 joint customers run an Oracle database on Itanium-based hardware from HP, and the prospect of having to change platforms is freaking them out, says Buik. The morning after Oracle said in March that it wouldn't develop for Itanium any more, Connect's discussion board was flooded with hundreds of comments, many blaming Oracle for the dispute.
The fight got even uglier last week when HP filed suit against Oracle, claiming that the database giant has failed "to live up to and simple promise to work with HP in the interests of both companies' mutual customers." The complaint goes on to accuse Oracle of "strong-arming" customers in an attempt to force them to move to Oracle's Sparc servers (acquired in the takeover of Sun) by refusing to fix bugs in software running on HP's high-end servers, a charge Oracle denies.
The FUD is flying