Itanic was bleak and that Intel was focused on x86 for the future, as did the rest of the world. They nevertheless didn't have a problem with pushing HP-UX as a platform, even the preferred platform, for their software. This was primarily because in giant Oracle accounts that are going to run Unix for the RAS and the big OS images there were three options. Sun, not a great option as it looked like they might go bankrupt and their Sparc servers not at all designed for database workloads. IBM Power, which is a good chip architecture for DB, but they were/are Oracle's largest enterprise DB competitor. HP, Itanium is certainly better suited than Sparc for DB and, prior to Soracle, Oracle did not have competitive areas with HP... so they pushed HP, knowing full well what they supposedly uncovered in 2010 about Itanium. Oracle is definitely not just dropping Itanium so they can "move their programmers" to better projects, like Sparc T. If this were just an Oracle decision about which chip sets looked they had a strong future and would be preferred by customers for Oracle DB, Sparc should have been dropped with Itanium. Itanium probably has multiple times more Oracle DB users than Sparc and Sparc's future doesn't look anymore promising than Itanium... Sparc wasn't dropped, for obvious reasons. Hmm... HP fired John Hurd, who is now big-honch at Oracle... coincidence? Nah. There could not possibly be any bitterness between them. After all, John Hurd is getting