SAP Wants Oracle's TomorrowNow Award Cut Way Down

Published: July 18, 2011

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The TomorrowNow saga continued dragging on last week and looked no closer to being a closed matter than it did last November when a jury at trial awarded Oracle a $1.3 billion settlement from SAP for the theft of software patches and other intellectual property relating to third-party support of Oracle's applications by TomorrowNow.

That small company, which SAP shut down in 2008 in the wake of the lawsuit launched by Oracle saying that TomorrowNow was using illegally its own software and documents to provide support to customers, has caused a big headache for SAP, which clearly bought TomorrowNow to annoy Oracle. (That's a bit like jamming a stick in a hornet's nest, with predictable results.)

According to a report in Bloomberg last week, the lawyers for both sides met with U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, California, on Wednesday and told her that they didn't think having a mediator would lead to a settlement over the amount of money SAP needs to pay Oracle. SAP's lawyers argued that the damages should be no higher than 28 million to $408 million by its math--a factor of 10 higher figure than SAP had been saying during the trial--and the judge told the lawyers she had not made up her mind yet about reducing the damage award or SAP's petition for a new trial because the award amount was too high in proportion to the actual damages.

SAP has argued that the economic damages that TomorrowNow has done should be based on revenues that Oracle lost and revenues that the TomorrowNow unit gained (and therefore helped pad the SAP books) from the third-party support contracts it had with customers where the illegally gotten material was used. Oracle wants what the jury awarded. Plus interest. Not a penny less--and more if it can get it.

It almost makes you want to use Microsoft Dynamics or write your own ERP suite in RPG or Java, doesn't it?

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