There is little to add to the Silicon Valley soap opera that hasn’t been posted somewhere else recently. Here is a summary  of the more relevant facts relating to Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) and Hewlett Packard (NYSE:HPQ).

1. After a quarter century of working together closely, Oracle started competing with HP by selling computer servers with Oracle's $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems last year.

2. HP sued Hurd in a California court on Tuesday, a day after he joined Oracle. HP argues that Hurd won't be able to do his job at Oracle without spilling HP's trade secrets.

There is no shortage of colorful figures. At the top, though is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who recently shared his opinion of the HP board with this memorable letter sent to the New York Times 

The H-P Board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago. That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn’t come back and saved them. H-P had a long list of failed CEOs until they hired Mark who has spent the last five years doing a brilliant job reviving H-P to its former greatness. In losing Mark Hurd, the H-P board failed to act in the best interest of H-P’s employees, shareholders, customers and partners.

Mistakes are in the eye of the beholder, and in business, the overall impression is called “reputation.” We turn to the reputation metrics, courtesy of Steel City Re.

One month out from when HP dismissed Mr. Hurd, HP’s reputation metrics are sliding, and enterprise value is disappearing. After riding steadily at the 95th percentile in the Reputation Index ranking of its peer group, Computer Processing Hardware, HP is now in the 84th percentile. The exponentially weighted moving average volatility is climbing and both the trailing twelve week vector and velocity are materially negative. Not surprisingly, the company is underperforming its peers by 28%.



Oracle's reputation is not unblemished either. Rather than an uptick, Hurd’s arrival was associated with a material drop in the Reputation Index ranking and an uptick in volatility. But the equity markets appear to be tolerating the move, at least in the short term, with Oracle currently outperforming the median of its 110-member Packaged Software peer group by 2.4%. So Oracle is winning the reputation derby -- so far. But this is a soap opera, so stay tuned.