Oracle loses appeal over billions in payment to HPE over Itanium shutdown

The California Court of Appeal has dismissed Oracle’s appeal in HPE’s end of Itanium support. With this, Oracle seems to have to pay a final compensation of 3 billion dollars.

The California Supreme Court dismissed Oracle’s appeal on Wednesday without further explanation, the San Francisco Chronicle writes. In theory, Oracle can still go to the Supreme Court of the United States, according to The Register, but this court does not deal with all submitted cases and this must involve, for example, the interpretation of federal laws. It is therefore possible that the rejection of the appeal has brought an end to a long-running case between Oracle and HPE.

That case concerns damage that HP would have suffered in the past as a result of Oracle’s discontinuation of support for Itanium processors. Hewlett Packard Enterprise split from HP in late 2015 and continued the business. Itanium processors for servers were initially developed by Intel and HP, with support from Oracle, Red Hat and Microsoft, among others.

Red Hat and Microsoft withdrew that support, but Oracle guaranteed HP in 2010, upon the departure of HP CEO Mark Hurd to Oracle, that the company would maintain its long-standing partnership with HP and would provide software support for Itanium server CPUs. keep bidding. However, in 2011, the company suddenly announced that support for Intel’s Itanium CPUs was being discontinued. Intel itself had already put development on the back burner at the time and stopped Itanium permanently in 2019.

In any case, according to HP, Oracle’s promise was a contract it had to abide by. The judge agreed with HP in 2012 and in 2016 the jury awarded HP $3.14 billion in damages. Last June, the appeals court upheld the earlier verdict and rejected Oracle’s claim that the damages were excessive.