A high-ranking executive from Hewlett Packard advised the company's channel partners to demand Oracle to continue supporting Intel Corp.'s Itanium-based mission-critical servers with new software. HP claims that Oracle may change its mind once it hears feedback from its customers.

"We are asking you to rally around and ask Oracle to reverse this decision. Call or write - they have changed their minds in the past on issues, and we are asking you to rally to make this happen," said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager for HP's enterprise servers, storage, and networking business, during his speech at HP's Americas Partner Conference 2011 in Las Vegas, reports CRN web-site.

According to the vice-president of HP, the company commands 26% of Unix server market and is ahead of Sun/Oracle based on market share. Still, Oracle applications are the most common software running on HP's HP-UX Unix platform. As a result, Oracle's decision to cancel development of new software for Intel Itanium-based platforms (citing end-of-life of the IA64) looks like an attempt to boost popularity of its own SPARC platform.

"In a high market share area, this is a shameless attempt to force customers to spend a lot of money to move to a platform over time that gives customers no benefits. Oracle made this decision to slow Sun SPARC market losses," added Mr. Donatelli.

Chief executive officer of HP also believes that Oracle's decision is motivated by performance of its own hardware business and desire to get additional customers, but not by the uncertainties with Itanium or HP-UX roadmaps. According to HP, Itanium and HP-UX will continue to exist for over ten years.

"From my perspective, it's a rather clumsy attempt by Oracle to try and prop up a failing and deteriorating Sun server business. It is an anticompetitive decision, it is self interested and it is to the endangerment of customers," said Leo Apotheker, the CEO of HP.

Tags: HP, Itanium, Oracle, Intel, IA64