Jon Swartz

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — A California jury on Thursday ordered Oracle to pay the former Hewlett Packard $3 billion in damages over HP's claim that Oracle reneged on a deal to support HP computer servers running on Itanium chips from Intel.

Oracle said it will appeal.

"Two trials have now demonstrated clearly that the Itanium chip was nearing end of life, HP knew it, and was actively hiding that fact from its customers," Oracle General Counsel Dorian Daley said in a statement late Thursday.

The decision followed a month-long trial in Superior Court in San Jose, stemming from Oracle's decision in 2011 to cease offering its products on HP's Itanium servers, according to HP.

"Oracle's decision to stop future software development on the Itanium server platform in March of 2011 was a clear breach of contract that caused serious damage to HP and our customers," John Schultz, general counsel for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said in a statement.

The jury decision could have far-reaching implications for other IT partnerships between competing companies that occasionally do business together, says Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT Research.

HP's legal team had argued that evidence showed Oracle (ORCL) "breached a clear contractual obligation to HP and acted in bad faith, with the intention of driving hardware sales from HP's Itanium to Oracle's Sun servers."

Oracle goes to court again, this time as defendant vs. HP

The core of HP's case was that sales from its Business Critical Systems division declined after Oracle spurned Itanium. HP, which has since been split into HPE and Hewlett Packard Inc., claimed it went from business partner to nemesis after Oracle acquired then-HP rival Sun Microsystems for $5.3 billion in 2010.

Tensions intensified in early 2011, when Oracle said it would cease making new versions of its databases and software for Itanium-based systems because Intel, which developed Itanium with HP, indicated it intended to phase it out.

The setback marks the second legal defeat for Oracle in recent weeks. In May, Alphabet defeated Oracle in a six-year dispute over software copyrights.

Oracle sought $8.8 billion because, it claims, Google's Android violated its copyright on parts of the Java programming language. Google said the fair-use provision of copyright law allowed it to use Java without paying a fee.

Oracle, Google clash in court with all-star witness list

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