Enterprise software was on BBC News24 this morning, but for the wrong reasons. You’ll probably have heard that Oracle is suing SAP. Oracle’s own release is brief:
“On March 22, 2007, Oracle filed a lawsuit in U.S. Federal District Court in the Northern District of California against SAP. Among the claims made against SAP are violations of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, Unfair Competition, Intentional and Negligent Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage and Civil Conspiracy.”
The full text is here. The dispute centres around the SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow which provides third party maintenance on Oracle products. Oracle wonders how they could provide maintenance services at 50% of their prices and alleges that part the reason is that SAP unlawfully accessed and copied Oracle’s Software and Support Materials. A lot of thinking has been done overnight since the story broke:
Dennis thinks this could not have come at a worse time for SAP and hopes the true economics of business software gets a good airing.
Vinnie thinks it’s a sad day for Enterprise Software.
Jason Wood gives his thoughts and thinks that Larry Ellison will “play up the “wounded Oracle” angle for as long as this litigation persists“.
Nick Carr calls this a move to full scale war between and can’t wait to see SAP’s response.
Larry Dignan pulls out large chunks of Oracle’s lawsuit and thinks that if this goes to trial “details about the cutthroat nature of the enterprise applications business, pricing practices, customer testimony and corporate espionage precedent are likely to emerge“.
Josh Greenbaum has an alternate take and thinks this “highlights the effectiveness with which TomorrowNow is hitting Oracle where it hurts“.
This may be set to dominate enterprise software news for some time to come. I can see a potential positive contribution to the debate on software maintenance practices and margins, but I’d prefer the airtime to be taken up by positive innovations from vendors rather than the sort of negative press that leads up to a major corporate trial.
