For the wrong reasons, but yes, I love Mark Hurd!
No, I hardly know the man, but since the ex- HP CEO joined Oracle, things have been pretty interesting on the Blue-Red battlefield and I am loving him for every gossipy morsel, happenings and market insights being exposed – all due to him.
HP and Oracle have been in a love-hate relationship as long as anyone can remember.
Both companies are partners on one hand, whereby Oracle applications are committed to run on HP servers and infrastructure. Yet, both are enemies on the other hand because Oracle applications run well (or likely better) on Oracle Sun servers as well.
However since Mark Hurd’s moving over to Red camp in 2010, the ‘hate’ portion of the relationship has been heating up as well.
In the recent Oracle-Dropping-Itanium law suit, an interesting result is HP’s huge USD4 billion dollar damages lawsuit – which actually gives the market an indication of Blue’s actual business dependency on the Red playing fair…
However, the more interesting fact is that while Blue says that Red violated the contract to maintain long term support for HP’s Itanium-based boxes, Red seems to be rolling its eyes when its attorney said, “Oracle had never agreed to give up its flexibility (to decide on any box support strategy) for brief, breezy contract language (used to reaffirm the Oracle-HP partnership even with Hurd’s termination).”
In short, Oracle is saying ‘No, I never said THAT.’
Once again, Mark Hurd’s personal lawsuit (*cough*… scandal) matter is brought up as a key factor in deciding which way the dispute of corporate giants will go.
Meanwhile, whichever way the case goes at the Superior Court in California, many think that it’s too late for a change of direction.
Quite a number at the recent HP Annual User Conference already agreed that collateral damage has been done.
No doubt, Red’s decision is already forcing the hand of one too many IT decision makers who are already starting to make alternative plans to their existing runs on HP Itanium boxes.
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IT BYTES BACK! says: Ruthlessness Rules Some Days. Welcome to the Real Red World.
