Autonomy’s Mike Lynch gets the Oracle treatment
You have to hand it to Oracle, it never misses a chance to humiliate its rivals in public.
On Wednesday it was the turn of Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy. His provocation? To have publicly denied that he tried to “shop” his company to Oracle before eventually selling to Hewlett-Packard. (This has now turned into a “he said, she said” – see updates, below)
Hewlett-Packard sues Oracle over…stuff
In the latest salvo in a continuing battle between former allies, Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday filed suit against Oracle over the latter’s announced refusal in March to keep making new versions of its database software for HP servers based on the Itanium chip. But it is hard to know whether the case has much hope.
Oracle ends all Itanium development
File this one under “Oracle takes another dig at HP” or “Oracle kicks Intel when it’s already down”.
In a statement overnight, the database company said it had decided to stop all software development for the Intel Itanium microprocessor, where HP is one of the few server makers still supporting the chip.
In today’s FT Comment, John Gapper gives his opinion on Larry Ellison’s recent “policing” of Silicon Valley.
Gapper writes:
“Oracle’s chief executive should take some deep breaths and calm down. Perhaps HP should have stuck with Mr Hurd, and maybe Mr Apotheker ought to have done more to stop copyright infringement at TomorrowNow. But Mr Ellison is ill-suited to his self-appointed role as Silicon Valley’s ethics tsar.”
High noon in Oakland? Not yet
Pulses quickened in a Federal courtroom in Oakland, California on Tuesday when a lawyer for Oracle promised jurors in the Oracle v SAP trial that they would get to hear evidence from Léo Apotheker, now the boss of HP.
So does that mean Mr Apotheker has accepted the challenge thrown down last week by Larry Ellison, his counterpart at Oracle, to turn up and face the music? It sounded as though Mr Ellison’s taunt, about how the HP CEO might choose to stay “far, far away” from the courtroom, had paid off.
SAP’s biggest challenge: Silencing Ellison
Is SAP about to take the same sort of battering in the press from Oracle that has made HP’s board quail recently? Not if it can help it.
Late on Friday, SAP asked a Californian court to put a gag order on Oracle’s legal counsel ahead of the scheduled November 1 start of the trial to decide damages in the TomorrowNow case. But even if it can silence Oracle’s lawyers, SAP probably has a bigger problem on its hands: Larry Ellison, who shows no inclination to hold back in public.
Sun sackings over? Not yet
Five months after its acquisition by Oracle, the axe continues to fall on employees at Sun Microsystems.
This is what CEO Larry Ellison had to say in January:
The truth is we’re actually hiring 2,000 people over the next few months to beef up these businesses, and that’s about twice as many people as we’ll be laying off.
Late on Friday, though, Oracle said it would add massively to the $325m of restructuring costs it had projected from the Sun integration. There will be an additional $675-825m of charges, with around 80 per cent of that apparently earmarked for employee severance costs.
Oracle v Brussels
The FT’s editorial page takes issue with the EU Commission’s involvement in the Oracle / Sun deal:
The mere possibility that a $7.4bn technology merger in California might be blocked by regulators nearly half the world away over a fly-speck of a business shows how odd the dispute over Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems has become.
EU gets ready to stuff Oracle’s turkey
Despite signs that the over-heated rhetoric is cooling down a bit, it’s too soon to predict a compromise in the transatlantic falling-out over Oracle’s plan to buy Sun.
European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes was more measured in her comments to reporters on Wednesday, suggesting that some sort of agreement might be possible that would protect competition in the database market and allow the dispute to blow over. That certainly sounded less punchy than her own spokesman’s attack on Oracle earlier in the week as “facile and superficial”.
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