[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[JF Mezei]

Howard S Shubs wrote:

> That assumes HP does that soon.  There's no reason to believe they will, 

One of the Oracle documents that was "obtained" from HP showed HP
expected customers to learn about the EOL of Itanium in 2012.

With BCS bleeding customers at a high rate, and sales of IA64 systems
tanking, the sooner the EOL is announced, the sooner the financial
burden can stop.

Here is how I see it unfold:

Poulson released, HP announces Poulson based systems
HP (finally) unveils some real hardware and software for its project
odyssey.

HP announces that the speed curve for x86 is such that it will (or has)
surpassed IA64 based systems and that IA64 systems will be EOLed, with
Kittson and a speedbump coming a year later, and garantees sales of IA64
for only 5 years. (and thus support for 10 years, but since HP doesn't
lose money on support, this is less important).

The second HP fesses up that IA64 is a lame duck waiting to be EOLed,
Oracle no longer needs to lift a finger to hurt HP. So it would have no
reason to purposefully delay HP-UX releases. But it will also have fewer
reasons to add resourxes to get those versions out very fast.

Was was quite smart about this Oracle thing is that it lasted long
enough for many customers to put into place porting projects to leave
HP-UX. Those projects will not stop with the result of thos lawsuit
saying Oracle must continue to provide new versions.

What Oracle did was only part of the overall scene which caused
customers to decide to migrate away from IA64 based systems. They
already knew that IA64 had finite lifetime and migration was going to
have to be done eventually anyways. Oracle acted more as a catalyst to
force those decision to be taken sooner rather than later.