After a last-month ruling by Santa Clara Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg that Oracle was contractually obligated to continue providing support Hewlett-Packard (HP)’s Itanium-based servers, Oracle said in a Tuesday statement that it will carry on Itanium server support for HP.

The court’s ruling came in the high-profile Oracle-HP lawsuit, which HP had filed after Oracle revealed in a March 2011 announcement that it would discontinue the development of new versions of its software for Itanium.

The argument which Oracle had put forth at that time was that it was under no contractual obligation with HP to persist with its support for the HP servers based on Itanium chips – Intel’s processor architecture used largely in HP-UX servers. Oracle had said that its decision was an upshot of the fact that Itanium was nearing the last lap of its life.

However, with Judge Kleinberg ruling that there had been a contract between HP and Oracle for the latter’s continued support to HP’s Itanium-based servers, Oracle said in its Tuesday statement that the company’s software on HP's Itanium computers will be rolled out in coincidence with the release of its software on IBM's Power systems.

Citing Judge Kleinberg’s verdict, Oracle said that it was reversing its earlier stance on the matter, and that it would now “continue building the latest versions of its database and other software covered by the judge's ruling to HP Itanium computers.”