Years ago, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise sued Oracle for an alleged breach of contract. All this was because Oracle decided to stop manufacturing its database software for Itanium , which is what HPE's servers depended greatly on. The two companies recently met to discuss damages, and HPE walked away the winner with Oracle owing the computer manufacturing giant upwards of $3 billion.
As Yahoo! narrates, everything started when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and started to build its own servers. By doing so, Oracle became a direct competitor of HPE. This ended the long-standing relationship between Oracle and HPE.
Before the trial, the professional relationship between the two companies lasted at least three decades. Further, Oracle stopped manufacturing the database software for Itanium. Unfortunately, HPE's high-performance servers were built on Intel's Itanium chip.
So in 2011, HPE brought Oracle to court, arguing that it was because of the Sun Microsystems servers that the market's demand for its own Itanium-based servers was declining. HPE subsequently sued Oracle for breaching their contract.
Regarding the breach of contract, Oracle argued that the deal with HPE did not include a section which stated the company had to continue support for Itanium-based products. However, the court ordered that Oracle must continue support for the products in 2012.
However, Oracle still believed they were on the right. As Business Insider quotes, Oracle's lawyer, Dorian Daley, stated that "Oracle never believed it had a contract to continue to port our software to Itanium indefinitely and we do not believe so today; nevertheless, Oracle has been providing all its latest software for the Itanium systems since the original ruling while HP and Intel stopped developing systems years ago."
It is also worth stating that the rivalry took a bitter turn when Oracle hired Mark Hurd as their Co-President. Hurd had previously worked for HPE as their Chief Executive Officer. HPE correspondingly filed a lawsuit stating that Hurd would provide his new company with "valuable trade secrets."
