HP And Intel Notch Court Victory Over Oracle For Itanium Chips

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Trefis
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In March 2011, Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) announced that it would no longer develop new versions of Oracle’s database and other products on the Intel Itanium platform due to its belief that the chip is at the end of its life-cycle. [1] Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) refuted this claim and said that it had plans to continue developing and supporting the chip. [2]

This affected Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) as well as Itanium microprocessors are used in its high-end HP Integrity line of servers and led to a lawsuit where HP had sued Oracle for $4 billion in damages. In August 2012, Judge James Kleinberg of the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara, ruled in favor of HP and said that Oracle has to keep porting its software to Itanium until HP stops selling the platform. Oracle has since released a statement saying it will continue to support the Itanium server line as per the ruling. [3]

See our full analysis on HP

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HP Servers And Storage Division To Benefit

The servers and storage division of HP constitutes 15% of our current price estimate and is the second largest division of HP after Services. We expect the ruling to help its storage and servers revenue as the Itanium chips were used in the high-end server line of HP and sales had taken a hit since Oracle announced its plan to drop support for devices running the Itanium chips.

Popular products such as the NonStop and OpenVMS environments, and a few proprietary mainframe platforms in Europe and Japan, have been ported to Itanium. The HP-UX is the dominant operating system on Itanium gear, and business would have been a $5 billion business opportunity, if not for Oracle’s announcement about stopping product development for the line. [4] We expect the server line to pick up in the coming quarters as consumer confidence in the product is restored.

We currently have a $30 Trefis price estimate for HP, which is around 40% above of the current market price.

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Notes:
  1. Oracle News Release, www.oracle.com []
  2. Chip Shot: Intel Reaffirms Commitment to Itanium, www.newsroom.intel.com, March 23, 2011 []
  3. Oracle Issues Statement, www.marketwire.com, Sep 4, 2012 []
  4. Oracle Restarts Itanium Support, www.theregister.co.uk, Sept 10, 2012 []