Oracle may seek more than $1 billion damages from SAP in IPR lawsuit

Another war between software giants is set to begin, and it will be fought not on consumers' minds and computers, but in the US law courts. Database pioneer Oracle Corp. is reportedly seeking damages exceeding $1 billion (500 million pounds) in an intellectual property rights (IPR) lawsuit it has brought against arch-rival SAP AG, according to a court filing.

Oracle is suing TomorrowNow, an American subsidiary of Germany-based SAP, for corporate theft and alleges it illegally downloaded masses of Oracle customer service materials and passed those documents to SAP.

"Because defendants have not provided Oracle with critical information relevant to liability and resulting damages, Oracle does not yet know its damages with precision," Oracle said in a filing this week to the US District Court in San Francisco, California.

"But, even so, it appears Oracle's damages are, at a minimum, well into the several hundreds of millions of dollars and likely are at least a billion dollars."

SAP countered the charges in the joint discovery statement, saying, "Oracle speculates wildly about the amount of its damages 'claim' in this discovery report, even though more than a year after this case was filed, Oracle still refuses to identify with any precision the nature or amount of its alleged harm or even to provide the theory on which its damage claim is based."

SAP has said that employees of TomorrowNow, which specialises in customer support for PeopleSoft and JD Edwards software, authorized to download materials from Oracle's Web site on behalf of TomorrowNow's customers, but also acknowledged that "some inappropriate downloads of fixes and support documents occurred.''

But this information remained in TomorrowNow's systems, and SAP did not gain access to Oracle's intellectual property, according to SAP. In addition, SAP has already produced about 2.3 million pages of documents from 42 custodians, and under its proposed limit of 115 custodians, will turn over another 4 million records, according to the German major.

That total does not include an "additional 6 terabytes of data already produced in native form and non-custodian based documents and information to be produced from central repositories and the like," it said. "If Defendants' alleged wrongdoing is as pervasive as Oracle claims, that surely is enough discovery to allow Oracle to present its case."

SAP bought TomorrowNow in 2005 after Oracle bought PeopleSoft, which in turn had acquired JD Edwards - hoping to exploit uncertainty among PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers as to how Oracle would support them.

An Oracle spokeswoman said the company would have no additional comment.

Andy Kendzie, a spokesman for SAP, also called Oracle's damages claims speculative.

"What I would stress is that these are strictly allegations, they haven't been proved," he said. "Our intent is not to litigate this in the press. We have said all along this is going to be the court's decision, and we're going to abide by the courts."

A joint discovery conference for the case is scheduled for 1 July, according to the filing.

Oracle specialies in developing and marketing enterprise software products, particularly database management systems. The corporation has arguably become best-known due to association with its flagship Oracle database.

The company also builds tools for database development, middle-tier software, enterprise resource planning software (ERP), customer relationship management software (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) software.

For the last few years, Oracle has spent billions on acquisitions over the last few years to challenge SAP's leadership in ERP and CRM. It is the second largest software company in the world after Microsoft with annual revenues of $18 billion last year.

SAP is the world's largest business software company and the third-largest independent software provider in terms of revenues. It focuses on six industry sectors: process industries, discrete industries, consumer industries, service industries, financial services, and public services. It reported 2007 revenues of €10.25 billion ($16 billion).

Source: www.domain-b.com

Read more ...