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"Oracle made the announcements two days after an HP industry analyst event where Skaugen told us about the next two versions of Itanium, plus information about a third upcoming version," he said. "Intel has been more upfront about the Itanium than ever before."
Customers were mixed about whether they thought reducing the number of platforms support by Oracle software was a primary motive for ending development for the Itanium platform, with 39 percent agreeing and 39 percent disagreeing with that as a reason, Olds said.
Customers also did not believe the Oracle move was a personal or public grudge by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison or Oracle President Mark Hurd, who until last year was HP's president and CEO, Olds said. Nor did customers attribute the move to Oracle wanting HP to "pay to port," he said.
By "pay to port," Olds said he was referring to Oracle's practice in the past to ask server vendors to guarantee Oracle a certain value from developing software for their servers, which he said typically happens before Oracle drops support for such servers. "In this case, I'm not hearing anything about pay to port, and customers said they aren't hearing about it," he said.
Oracle declined to respond to questions about the survey.
However, Oracle has in the past said that it is not ending support of the Itanium platform, but instead is ending development of future products for the Itanium, just as Microsoft and Red Hat did in 2010.
Oracle also said earlier that it will offer customers maintenance and support of Oracle software on Itanium servers for five years from the general availability date of the software release, and an additional three years of extended support for a fee.
The company said it will also provide Oracle Sustaining Support customers with technical support for as long as they operate their Itanium-based systems.
Olds said that, while Oracle and HP are both customers of his firm, as are other vendors such as IBM, Dell, Microsoft, and VMware, no vendors sponsored the survey.
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