Recently when Oracle made an announcement of stopping the development of software for the Itanium microprocessor then David Donatelli, HP Executive VP, felt quite disappointed by this step.

In an official statement, he said that this step would put a lot of businesses in danger costing them hundreds of millions due to the loss of productivity. He opined that it was the obligation of Oracle to issue an advanced notice of any such decision to its customers so that they could plan or manage within that time.

In addition, he said, “HP is well aware that Intel’s future direction is focused on X86 and that plans to replace Itanium with X86 are already in place. HP is knowingly withholding this information from our joint Itanium customers. Oracle is the last of the major software companies to stop development on Itanium”.

HP has called this move of Oracle as nothing but a shameless gambit to limit fair competition but at the same time, Oracle has responded to it that HP was knowingly withholding information from its Itanium customers.

Oracle’s latest announcement is likely to hurt HP badly and its Itanium based servers but justifying its step, Oracle has said that Intel's Itanium was nearing the end of its life and that companies like Microsoft (MSFT) and Red Hat (RHT) had already stopped developing software for Itanium.