"You're never going to see a deal like this again," Wang said. "You always have a start date and an end date."

In fact, behind the often vague expressions of devotion in partnership announcements between technology vendors, most such deals are spelled out in great detail, said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Evan Quinn.

"If you were to go and dig into the vast majority of these types of contracts, you would find a fair amount of legalese," including terms governing how long the partnership will last and procedures for renewing it, Quinn said. This is especially true of software deals, which are particularly ripe for finger-pointing when something goes wrong for a mutual customer, he said.

For existing users of Oracle software on Itanium, which HP estimates make up 84 percent of enterprises using the platform, Kleinberg's decision may be a hopeful sign in a generally worrisome situation, according to Quinn. Pure business sense demands that Oracle make an honest effort even for strictly court-ordered software versions, he said.

"I do not believe Larry Ellison is going to go back to his database technology team and (say) 'Throw your worst five engineers on the port to Itanium," Quinn said.