Oracle and Hewlett Packard Head Back to Court

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 [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 22, 2016 21:15 ET (01:15 GMT)

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