Oracle enjoys fine Q3 as HP spat escalates

Boom in new software licences for Sun owner but ugly sniping with competitor continues

New software licences fuelled an upbeat set of third-quarter numbers for Oracle, but the vendor's war of words with competitor HP shows no sign of slowing down.

Oracle's GAAP sales for the three months to the end of February grew 37 per cent year on year to $8.8bn (£5.5bn), with net income up 62 per cent to $3bn. New software licences added $2.2bn to the top line, a 29 per cent spike on last year. Hardware chipped in revenue of $1bn.

Chief executive Larry Ellison said: "In Q3 we signed several large hardware and software deals with some of the biggest names in cloud computing. For example, Salesforce.com's new multi-year contract enables them to continue building virtually all of their cloud services on top of the Oracle database and Oracle middleware. Oracle is the technology that powers the cloud."

The vendor recently revealed it is stopping development of software for Intel Itanium microprocessors. HP was quick to put the boot in, claiming that the move was anti-competitive.

Dave Donatelli, general manager of HP's enterprise servers, storage and networking unit, said: "Oracle continues to show a pattern of anti-customer behaviour as they move to shore up their failing Sun server business.

"We are shocked that Oracle would put enterprises and governments at risk while costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity in a shameless gambit to limit fair competition."

But Oracle was quick to hit back at accusations that the move would hurt high-level customers, with a representative claiming that "just the opposite is true".

"Oracle has an obligation to give our customers adequate advanced notice when Oracle discontinues development on any software product or hardware platform, so our customers have the information they need to plan and manage their businesses," added the representative. "HP is well aware that Intel's future direction is focused on X86 and plans to replace Itanium with X86 are already in place.

"HP is knowingly withholding this information from our joint Itanium customers. While new versions of Oracle software will not run on Itanium, we will support existing Oracle/Itanium customers on existing Oracle products. In fact, Oracle is the last of the major software companies to stop development on Itanium."

HP has stressed that its Itanium-based Integrity server platforms and HP-UX operating system still has a 10-year development roadmap.