HP's lawsuit against Oracle over its plan to stop developing software for Intel's Itanium processors was dismissed as a "publicity stunt" by Larry Ellison's briefs.

According to Oracle court documents, which were found by PC World, HP had a cunning plan to “lay the blame on Oracle for the disruption that will occur when HP's Itanium-based server business inevitably comes to an end." HP claims that Oracle pulling the rug from underneath Itanium customers was an attempt by Ellison to bolster its flagging competing Sunsparc technology.

However Larry knows better. The court documents say that HP put itself and thousands of customers out on the end of a very long limb because “HP, almost alone now, clings to a decades-old microprocessor architecture that has no future”. He claims that Intel has wanted to discontinue Itanium production for years and was "perpetuating a myth" that Itanium has a 10-year road map and instead is "suing Oracle for the temerity to tell customers the truth.

Oracle claims that there was never any agreement between the two companies to support Itanium. In fact the only agreement that they ever had was a "corporate hug" between Oracle and HP following the resolution of a lawsuit HP filed against its former CEO, Mark Hurd, after he took a job as co-president of Oracle, the court documents claim.

During the Hurd dispute, HP asked Oracle to support "all ongoing versions" of its HP-UX operating system, which runs on Itanium-based servers. But Oracle rejected the request because it was so “out of line”.