Intel has been dragged into Oracle and Hewlett Packard's ongoing legal dispute over Oracle's decision to ditch the wildly underperforming Itanium platform.
The problem, from Intel's perspective, is that Oracle has been asking for lots and lots of Intel documents during the discovery process -- and that Oracle just happens to compete with Intel these days. It makes the UltraSPARC processor, picked up in Oracle's 2010 purchase of Sun Microsystems. Intel has been coughing up documents, but it doesn't want Oracle General Counsel Dorian Daley looking at Intel's product roadmap.
The tussle is just the latest chapter is an increasingly bitter fight spanning three of the tech world's biggest names. It all began when HP dumped its CEO, Mark Hurd, an old pal of Oracle boss Larry Ellison. Oracle then hired Hurd and soon announced that it would no longer support its software on HP’s HP-UX platform, which runs on the Itanium processor, a chip designed by HP in tandem with Intel. HP then sued Oracle, saying that it had a deal with Oracle to keep supporting HP's Itanium-based servers. Oracle denies this, and it has counter-argued that HP lied to its own customers about what a dud Itanium really is.
Oracle, HP, and Intel were at loggerheads for weeks in the fall over the discovery process, unable to reach an agreement. So last month, the feuding parties -- including Intel -- finally took the matter to the judge in the case, Santa Clara County Judge James Kleinberg. In a December 8 filing, Intel argues that Daley shouldn't be given access to sensitive documents because she's more than a just a lawyer; she also advises the company on major strategic business decision.
Oracle has asked for Itanium product roadmaps, strategy documents and emails dating back to January 1, 2005.
"Intel will likely produce thousands of highly confidential documents in response to Oracle's document subpoena," wrote Intel's lawyers in their court filing. Later, they added that Daley "will be unable to to compartmentalize and ignore Intel confidential information when she advises Oracle's management and Board as they decide how to compete with Intel."
"Intel is an innocent bystander in this fight," Intel said.
An innocent bystander, maybe, but one that was helping HP in its legal case by withholding information from Oracle's top lawyer, according to the database vendor. Shutting out Daley "severely hampers Oracle's ability to mount its defense," Oracle said in a December 12 filing.
But the judge didn't buy it. On January 5, he sided with Intel, cutting Daley out of the legal loop for many of these sensitive documents. And so the case grinds on, with a court date now set for April 2.
In the meantime, 140,000 Oracle customers running Itanium systems -- many of them large businesses running databases -- are left wondering what will happen.
Intel spokesman Sumner Lemon declined to comment on the case.
Ultimately, it's not a surprise that Intel wound up making a court appearance. In fact, Intel is hardly a bystander when it comes to Itanium. HP and Intel cooked up Itanium in the mid-1990s back when HP was designing its own chips for its Unix systems. It seemed like a great deal at the time. HP would save billions in chip designing costs, and Intel would have a super-chip that would take on Sun's UltraSPARC, IBM's Power, and others.
The only problem was that Itanium completely flopped. And aside from HP, server vendors quickly dumped it like bad fruit.
