Mobile Computing News

Photo: Oracle

Oracle has had a week which can only be described as one of mixed fortunes. They are currently under investigation by the US Justice Department over allegations of software contract fraud, and at the same time have achieved a one-up on the competition, as some of their rivals will now be selling their operating systems.

The bad news – being sued by the U.S government

The US Justice Department currently intends on suing Oracle for overcharging the department on inferior products compared to what Oracle was offering to their other private clients. The lawsuit, which is claimed to be worth more than a $1 billion, was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and originally raised by Paul Frascella under the False Claims Act. Though filed in April 2007, it was docked until Uncle Sam recently came onboard, looking to claim what’s his. The suit was raised as a result of Oracle only offering the federal government a 40 per cent discount compared to the 40-70 per cent discounts it was offering other private clients, and subsequently kept the information hidden from the department.

The good news – business is good

On the brighter side of things for Oracle, in what is a move which will provide more choice to clients running on x86 platform servers, Oracle announced on Thursday that they would be handing over certification and resale of its all its three operating systems to HP and Dell, their rival hardware vendors.

Photo: IXQUICK2 / Flickr

This move now means that Solaris, Oracle VM and Enterprise Linux will now be available from Helwett-Packard and Dell, however support for the operating systems will still be provided by Oracle through Premier Support contracts which are available for purchase. Oracle Co-president Charles Phillips also had a few words to share as he said, ‘Oracle Solaris is the industry’s number one UNIX operating system, and is in demand across multiple x86 platforms… Today’s announcement demonstrates Oracle’s commitment to openness and will provide Dell and HP customers with new levels of support, and immediate access to deep product expertise, limiting risk in their IT environment.’

On the other hand Paul Miller, Vice President of solutions and strategic alliances, enterprise servers, storage and networking at HP said that, ‘Customers need to instantly adjust to dynamic business demands, but many have hardwired stacks of applications and infrastructure that can’t rapidly change.’

The new contracts issued to Dell and HP by Oracle are not without some controversy, meaning that the atmosphere at the software developer should still remain tense.