HP, Oracle Trade Punches as Trial Gets Under Way
A lawyer for Hewlett-Packard Co. accused Oracle Corp. of breaching a contract — an allegation Oracle’s lawyer called “objectively not true” — as a trial between the Silicon Valley partners-turned-rivals began Monday.
The claim came during opening arguments in California Superior Court for Santa Clara County. At issue in the closely watched case is whether Oracle is obligated to keep updating its popular database software for high-end H-P server systems that use Itanium chips — a sideline from Intel Corp.’s mainstream technology that Oracle alleges was artificially kept alive by HP payments to the chip maker.
