HP, Oracle Fighting War Against Each Other Over Mark Hurd Contract [HP's Disgraced Former CEO Mark Hurd Back In The News, As His Current Employer & Previous Employer Fight Over Intel Server Processors]

Posted on TFTS by Kevin Schram on Tuesday, 30. August 2011 under: Computers & Computing

Do you remember Mark Hurd? The former HP CEO left the company in disgrace after he was caught fudging expense reports to pay for dates with a woman who was working for HP as a marketing contractor. Hurd fled to a position as co-president of Oracle, headed by his friend Larry Ellison. HP is back in the news again with all the webOS talk, but they’re also going after Oracle for breaching an agreement related to the hiring of Hurd.

When Oracle first offered Mark Hurd a job, there was some disagreement between HP and Oracle, as HP wasn’t keen on letting their former CEO run away to another major tech company. The two reached a settlement regarding Hurd, but now that contract is coming under fire. Back in March, Oracle announced they would no longer produce software for Intel Itanium processors, leaving HP’s servers without supported software.

HP says that in the Mark Hurd agreement, Oracle had vowed to continue to support the Intel Ithanium processors, which run on HP’s servers. Oracle says that there was no formal agreement to that in the Hurd settlement. Now, the two are going to court. Oracle has asked a court to dismiss the entire Mark Hurd contract, apparently trying to beat HP to the punch before they can file a breach-of-contract lawsuit. Oracle also isn’t happy that HP hired Leo Apotheker as a CEO to replace Hurd. Apotheker was an executive at SAP – a competitor to Oracle.

HP’s announcement that they would shed their webOS hardware business as well as spin off the desktop/laptop business is a clear sign that they’ll be moving towards being an enterprise-only company (IT services, software and servers). Obviously with that sort of new business model, they’ll need Oracle to offer software that runs on their servers. Poor Mark Hurd, no matter what he does, he just can’t get out of the news.

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