Oracle’s ongoing war with SAP is scaling new heights – it’s now calling out its closest rival over alleged theft.

AP had the story on the increasingly fevered battle between software maker Oracle Corp and SAP AG. From the looks of things, it definitely puts paid to the notion that enterprise tech is boring.

Oracle is in the midst of pursuing a fraud case, one it brought against SAP last year in San Francisco federal court. Hitting right where it hurts, Oracle made the allegations the day before SAP is scheduled to report its earnings from the second-quarter.

The gist of the latest accusation is that SAP supposedly knowingly bought and embraced an illegal operation that had one purpose – to steal Oracle’s products and customers. Stealing customers? Isn’t that usually called healthy competition?

At the heart of the lawsuit is TomorrowNow, a software maintenance specialist that SAP purchased as a reaction to Oracle’s purchase of PeopleSoft. TomorrowNow’s business proposition was to offer to support PeopleSoft’s products at lower prices than Oracle.

If that was all, perhaps Oracle would have kept its seething out of the courtroom. But the software maker claims that TomorrowNow broke into Oracle’s computers to obtain confidential data. It also alleges that SAP knew of, and condoned, TomorrowNow’s practise.

“For years, SAP profited from (TomorrowNow’s) illegal business model, without breathing a word about it to Oracle, SAP AG’s existing and prospective customers, or the investing public,” said Oracle’s lawyer in a document filed Monday. SAP’s spokesman Saswato Das declined to comment.

The allegations are serious and certainly put a black mark on SAP’s image. It doesn’t matter that SAP plans to shelve TomorrowNow on the basis of poor performance. With Oracle gaining market share (with the help of its numerous acquistions), SAP is struggling to compete and costly legal proceedings will divert valuable resources. Oracle’s going for blood and it’s going to likely be just the beginning of a massive chain of headaches for SAP the next few months.

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Entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 11:07 pm under Legal, Software.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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