News is just hitting the wires that Oracle has filed a lawsuit contending that SAP AG has raced beyond competitive analysis and into the realm of corporate espionage. According to the Oracle suit (pdf):
This case is about corporate theft on a grand scale. … Oracle brings this lawsuit after discovering that SAP is engaged in systematic, illegal access to – and taking from – Oracle’s computerized customer support systems. Through this scheme, SAP has stolen thousands of proprietary, copyrighted software products and other confidential materials that Oracle developed to service its own support customers. SAP gained repeated and unauthorized access, in many cases by use of pretextual customer login credentials, to Oracle’s proprietary, password-protected customer support website. From that website, has copied and swept thousands of Oracle software products and other proprietary and confidential materials onto its own servers. … This storehouse of stolen Oracle intellectual property enables SAP to offer cut rate support services to customers who use Oracle software, and attempt to lure them to SAP’s applications software platform and away from Oracle’s.
Serious, serious stuff, if true.
Oracle filed the suit today in U.S. Federal District Court in the Northern District of California.
No word as of yet from SAP.
(Update 2: No word yet from SAP as of Friday morning, but the company did declare a dividend yesterday. … Oracle shareholders might be wondering if they’re going to get a taste.)
(Update: Analysts explain what this suit means for the Oracle-SAP rivalry. … It doesn’t mean more inter-company softball games.)
