Yesterday, Oracle Corp. (ORCL Quick QuoteORCL - Free Report) lost the high profile Itanium software lawsuit against Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE Quick QuoteHPE - Free Report) . The state court of California has directed Oracle to cough up $3 billion in damages.

However, as expected, Oracle general Counsel Dorian Daley said "now that both trials have concluded, we intend to appeal both today's ruling and the prior ruling."

Oracle and HPE have been embroiled in a legal tangle involving software for Itanium chip-based servers over the last five years. HP Enterprise had asked for $3 billion in compensation from Oracle for allegedly causing a decline in the demand for its Itanium based products.

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HP Enterprise was formed after its parent company Hewlett Packard split into two separate entities — HP Inc. (HPQ Quick QuoteHPQ - Free Report) and HP Enterprise — in Nov 2015.

The dispute started in 2011 when Oracle decided to stop the development of software needed to run Itanium chip-based servers assuming that Intel Corp. would eventually stop the manufacture of Itanium chips fearing obsolescence. Intel and Hewlett Packard were joint manufacturers of these chips. Oracle’s decision came as a rude shock to HPE, then Hewlett Packard, as it uses the same Itanium chips in servers needed to run large corporate databases and other demanding computing tasks.

Hewlett Packard and Oracle shared a long-standing association for over three decades. However, things drastically soured when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems for $7.3 billion in Jan 2010. The buyout resulted in Oracle becoming a direct competitor of Hewlett Packard in the hardware segment.

In 2011, Hewlett Packard dragged Oracle to court accusing it of contract breach and also alleged that Oracle influenced customers to substitute their Itanium-based servers with its Sun servers.

In its defence, Oracle said that the deal with Hewlett Packard did not include an agreement to provide continued support for Itanium-based servers. However, in 2012, the judiciary sided with Hewlett Packard and ordered Oracle to keep supporting HPE’s Itanium-based servers.

The rivalry turned bitter when Oracle hired Hewlett Packard’s former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Hurd and appointed him Co-President. This did not go down well with Hewlett Packard and the company filed a lawsuit claiming “irreparable damage" as it believed that Hurd would provide “valuable trade secrets” to Oracle. This lawsuit was mutually settled later on.

This is the second big legal fight Oracle has lost in a matter of a few weeks. In May, a 10-member jury found no copyright violations of Oracle’s Java APIs by Alphabet (GOOGL Quick QuoteGOOGL - Free Report) while developing its Android system. Following the verdict, Daley had said “Oracle brought this lawsuit to put a stop to Google’s illegal behavior. We believe there are numerous grounds for appeal." 

Oracle sought $9.3 billion as compensation from Alphabet for unauthorized usage of Java APIs in its Android operating system. The dispute has been going on for the past six years now. Oracle had first sued Alphabet, then known as Google. It claimed that Google, in order to take a leading position in the mobile market, was striving to launch its operating system and therefore used Java unauthorized as it was a well-known script with a lot of programmers then. However, Google denied such allegations and maintained that the usage of Java APIs was protected under the “fair use” clause “which permits copying under limited circumstances.”

At present, both Oracle and HPE carry a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

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