SAP vs. Oracle

SAP weighs in on Oracle-Sun, Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal, long a recipient of scoops from SAP, earned a little wrath from the company this week when it penned an editorial suggesting CEO Leo Apotheker could smooth the way for an Oracle-Sun merger.

The editorial, published Nov. 5^th, reads, in part:

But since the Oracle merger investigation began, some observers have questioned whether the [European] Commission is holding up the merger at the urging of Germany’s SAP, which is a partner but also a competitor of Oracle-even though SAP does not compete with Sun.

It references “a multibillion-dollar industrial espionage lawsuit pending against SAP in the U.S.”

And concludes: Continued »

Will Rimini Street, and third-party support, be drawn into Oracle’s lawsuit against SAP?

Oracle’s demand for Rimini Street to give it information in its lawsuit against SAP wasn’t the only development in the SAP vs. Oracle saga last week.

Oracle also filed more allegations in the case - filing a fourth amended complaint that attempts to make Siebel and Oracle’s database technology part of the lawsuit.

Oracle now alleges that SAP extended TomorrowNow’s illegal business model to Siebel just days after Oracle completed the acquisition. It also says that TomorrowNow’s environments ran on copies of Oracle database software that weren’t licensed for commercial or production use, according to court documents. SAP refused to purchase Oracle database licenses for TomorrowNow’s use, “even though as an authorized Oracle database reseller, they knew full well the permissible uses of database copies,” the document states.

Oracle certainly hasn’t been shy about piling on the charges in this lawsuit - amending its original complaint four times over the past two years. One now has to wonder what this means for Rimini Street, and whether it will now be dragged into this lawsuit.

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What does SAP have to say about the Oracle-Sun deal?

You can always count on SAP executive Bill McDermott to give a piece of his mind on what SAP often refers to as its “next largest competitor.”

So when I even mentioned Oracle yesterday during an interview on SAP’s first quarter earnings, he gladly launched into his take on Oracle’s recent Sun acquisition unprompted.

 ”I think they have introduced a tremendous level of risk into their business model by making this wild foray into hardware,” McDermott said. “They know nothing about hardware and now they’ve made a move into the hardware business.”

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