Commentary: HP Oracle divorce battle

REVIEW: (MarketWatch) columnist Pulai Di (Therese Poletti) The author describes the background of Hewlett-Packard and Oracle in court, pointing out both the reasons they insist on their farce, and its results are likely only to IBM play off.

Below Pulai Di review article:HP accused of Oracle defaults courtroom drama this week officially opened the curtain, this wonderful theater really can only be staged in Silicon Valley.

This script involves a strange chip on the witness stand, some of the Silicon Valley's highest-profile role will display their war of words, including Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (Larry Ellison), and Hewlett-Packard and Intel, a number of high-level.

In addition, the plaintiff Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the appetite is big scary, they want the court to prohibit the defendant Oracle introduced a new version of software for the HP high-end computer server architecture.

The result is this bizarre chip called Itanium may have gained over the years have not been subjected to the attention, although it was born at the beginning seems to be destined to suffer from cold. The lawsuit once again put into the spotlight of the two companies who have partners have now become competitors, stopped attacking each other endlessly. At first, Oracle in an end of trading in January 2010, the first acquisition of HP's competitors in the SUN, fired the first shot.

As a high-performance dedicated computer chip, Itanium, once been acclaimed on behalf of the future of computing. That was in 1994, Hewlett-Packard and chip giant Intel (INTC) formed a rare partnership to jointly develop a chip for high-end server market, hoping to the efficacy of such a low price chip, SUN and IBM ( IBM) competition.

However, Itanium, it seems a beginning false starts. This program even within the Intel Corporation have also been some of the most senior engineer ridicule, some of the media more to borrow the spelling of the Titanic ridiculed for Itanic. In fact, the entire product family from the advent to the present has never truly been the creator of the original ambition."Obviously, this product has a lot of stories of the past." At Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood (Nathan Brookwood) said that "almost all our products are obsolete, their performance is very poor ... people they never no great enthusiasm. "

Itanium finally came to market in 2011, and the deviant did not use the Intel standard x86 architecture, in order to save computer memory. However, rival AMD (AMD) later introduced a solution of their own to use the x86 architecture. AMD's success with its x86-compatible Opteron server chip to win the favor of customers, because companies do not want to invest a lot of money to replace an important software. Itanium last resort, only hid the strong emphasis on the performance of the enterprise, technical computing market up.

Be like this, year after year, Intel Itanium customer is constantly losing. For example, Unisys to Corp. (UIS) said the same from under the door by the Intel-based x86 Xeon family of server chips continued to have a substantial lead, regardless of function or performance of our business customers to benefit from ". Unisys computer server finally say no to Itanium.However, HP had participated in the development of Itanium, as part of the aging system schema updates - update request from the from the merger of Compaq high-end chip technology - they need to Itanium-

"Currently, HP does not a good replacement policy." Enderle Group principal analyst Andrew Rob Enderle, explained, HP is to have used the PA / RISC chip, the Tandem's non-stop systems, and Digital Equipment Corp. Alpha systems all new customers to move to Itanium camp. "They will re-injection to bet on Itanium will rule the world above." Brookwood sigh, "But then, accompanied by the x86 in the high-end server market fought back, and everyone began to ask, why do we need Itanium-?"

For those older systems, the Oracle database is a key software program. "These systems are based on Oracle's operation, Oracle also makes Itanium using Oracle software is almost impossible." Andrew pointed out, to argue the Itanium future born or die, in fact, there is no need, "as long as HP hopes, Itanium, will continue to exist according to the e-mail from Oracle, Hewlett-Packard has been in the provision of funds to help the development of Itanium-The core of the problem is in fact the confrontation at Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. Like most of the divorce battle, the range of its spread may be more than two, and ultimately their customers involved in the latter will be tired of these troublesome thing invested in IBM's embrace.