Oracle's lawsuit against SAP

Filed in archive News on April 12, 2007

ERP Market has become really competitive and it's not like 90's anymore. The situation is so tough that sometimes one company sues another (Remember i2 Technologies from last month). Here is another one which I read in The Wall Street Journal and it's about Oracle's lawsuit against SAP:

In his first public response to a lawsuit from Oracle Corp., Andrew Nelson, chief executive of SAP AG's TomorrowNow subsidiary, said the unit uses legal methods to provide technical support to Oracle customers.

"We believe we've done absolutely nothing wrong, and we're going to defend our position vigorously," Mr. Nelson said. "We believe our model is an appropriate and legal way to do business."

An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment. Mr. Nelson was responding to claims made by Oracle in a suit filed last week in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. In the 43-page complaint, Oracle said SAP, through TomorrowNow, engaged in "corporate theft on a grand scale" in a series of "high-tech raids."

The suit alleges that people associated with TomorrowNow illegally accessed and downloaded huge quantities of documents, software and other confidential information from Oracle's technical-support system.

SAP, of Germany, acquired TomorrowNow in January 2005, around the time that Oracle acquired PeopleSoft. TomorrowNow, founded in 1998 by former PeopleSoft executives, provided technical support for PeopleSoft products. Buying TomorrowNow helped SAP offer a program called "Safe Passage," designed to provide its own support to PeopleSoft customers and others, in order to help woo them to SAP.