Oracle and Hewlett Packard Head Back to Court
23 March 2016 - 12:30PM
Dow Jones News
Longtime legal combatants Oracle Corp. and Hewlett-Packard are
taking their battle back to court.
Oracle on Tuesday filed a lawsuit alleging that Hewlett Packard
Enterprise Co. improperly partnered with Terix Computer Co., a
third-party seller of support for Oracle's Solaris operating
system.
Oracle requires customers to buy technical support from it
rather than from third parties.
"[In] its effort to generate additional support service
revenues, HP falsely represented to customers that HP and Terix
could lawfully provide Solaris Updates and other support services
at a lower cost than Oracle, and then worked with Terix to
improperly access and provide Oracle's proprietary Solaris Updates
to customers," Oracle claims in its suit.
"As a matter of company policy, Hewlett Packard Enterprise does
not comment on ongoing legal cases," an HP Enterprise
representative said in an email.
Though Oracle doesn't break out maintenance fees in its
financial reports, such fees can generate significant revenue and
margins for the company. In the third quarter that ended Feb. 29,
Oracle's hardware support revenue, which includes maintenance,
totaled $324 million. The company rang up a 61% margin on those
sales.
Oracle has sued other support providers as well, alleging that
they obtained copyrighted Solaris patches from Oracle's customer
support website and distributed them to their own customers. Last
spring, Oracle won a $57.7 million federal judgment against
Terix.
In the suit filed in federal court in the Northern District of
California, Oracle alleges that HP Enterprise should have known
that Terix couldn't provide the support services legally. The suit
claims that HP employees raised concerns to their executives and
the company's legal department that using Terix support violated
Oracle's copyright and technical support policies.
The two companies have a yearslong history of legal conflict. In
2010, Hewlett-Packard Co., from which HP Enterprise was spun out in
November, sued to block its former chief executive Mark Hurd from
joining Oracle. A year later, HP sued Oracle to prevent it from
ending support for high-end HP systems.
Oracle is seeking to enjoin HP Enterprise from distributing
Oracle support material and from facilitating others from doing so.
It also wants restitution for what it calls "ill-gotten gains" as
well as punitive damages to be determined at trial.
"Oracle obtained a judgment against Terix, and will continue to
pursue companies like HP that misappropriate our software for their
own financial gain," Oracle general counsel Dorian Daley said in a
statement.
Write to Jay Greene at Jay.Greene@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 22, 2016 21:15 ET (01:15 GMT)
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