A San Jose jury has awarded Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) $3 billion (£2.25B) in damages from Oracle after Oracle breached its contract to provide Itanium support in its namesake database and Linux distribution.

Oracle unilaterally decided to drop support for Itanium systems running HP's HP-UX operating system in 2011. HP (as it then was; the company split into two last year, with HPE retaining the interest in the server business) sued, claiming that Oracle was in breach of a 2010 contract between the two companies in which the database firm promised to support HP's Itanium systems.

That suit was decided in 2012 in HP's favor. The judge required Oracle to fulfill its contractual obligations to support HP's Itanium systems and decided that HP was due damages. Oracle resumed the software support in late 2012, but the damages portion was undetermined. The two companies were back in court some four years later to decide just what those damages should be.

HPE argued that the act of dropping support for Oracle's important database software greatly hurt the commercial viability of its Itanium products and, thus, that it suffered harm in spite of the resumption of support. While Itanium was never a mainstream technology, HPE said that it was nonetheless profitable and that Oracle's actions were intended to drive sales of Oracle's own Sun hardware.

The jury ultimately agreed with HPE and awarded it the full amount it was seeking, compensating the company for both lost sales and damages.

Oracle says that it will appeal both the original breach of contract decision and the subsequent damages award. It argues that the Itanium processor was clearly near the end of its life by 2011—Intel has not introduced any new models since November 2012—and that the contract never obligated the database firm to support HP's Itanium systems indefinitely.

HPE continues to provide support for existing Itanium systems, but the company has replaced Itanium processors with Intel Xeons in all new machines. Itanium systems remain on sale from a handful of other server companies specializing in high-availability, mission critical niches.

The animosity between HP and Oracle runs deep. In 2010, HP sued in an attempt to stop its former CEO Mark Hurd from joining Oracle. In March, Oracle sued HP over a partnership with Terix Computer, from which HP wanted to buy support services for Oracle's Solaris system. Oracle says HP was legally obligated to buy support services from it, not from third-party providers.

The massive verdict against Oracle comes just one month after Oracle suffered a courtroom loss to Google, a case in which Oracle was the plaintiff. Oracle had argued that Android infringed copyrights related to Java, but a jury ruled that Google was protected by "fair use."