Judge Expected to Rule Today in Oracle-HP Lawsuit Over Itanium

Today, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard will hear from the judge in their bitter legal fight over the Itanium server chip, sources at both companies tell AllThingsD.

The case concerns Oracle’s decision last year to stop building software that’s compatible with Intel’s Itanium chip. Intel is not a party to the suit. But HP is the only server vendor of note that sells systems using the chip, and makes a lot of money supporting customers who buy them. Oracle’s software is widely used by those customers.

HP sued in June of 2011, after publicly arguing that when it and Oracle settled a 2010 lawsuit over Mark Hurd’s joining Oracle as president, the two agreed that Oracle would continue to create Itanium-compatible software.

Oracle has argued that it is not bound by that agreement, that its decision doesn’t affect any products currently available, only future versions of its database software, and that HP and Intel had quietly planned to end production of Itanium chips. Either way, the fight has hurt HP’s business pretty badly.