A battle between two of the world’s biggest makers of business software hinges on the value of a trove of millions of stolen customer-support documents.
In its first pitch to a federal jury Tuesday, Oracle Corp. said archrival SAP AG’s plundering of password-protected Oracle Web sites dealt a $2 billion blow to Oracle’s business.
The attacks on Oracle’s resources at times seemed ham-handed.
Oracle said an SAP subsidiary, TomorrowNow, created bogus accounts to get access to walled-off Oracle Web sites. Once inside, Oracle said, TomorrowNow deployed computer programs that powered through page after page of support documents, “scraping” and saving the contents of those pages as they went.
Oracle spotted the fraud when it noticed an extraordinary amount of downloads coming from accounts that were registered with clearly bad information, such as bad phone numbers (“777-7777”) and made-up names (“Tom Now”) seemingly connected with the SAP subsidiary. Oracle technicians were also easily able to tell that the downloads went to TomorrowNow servers.
SAP, which is based in Walldorf, Germany, has admitted that the now-shuttered subsidiary secretly siphoned off instruction manuals and technical specifications for Oracle’s software. But SAP argues that Oracle’s claims of injury are exaggerated. It says it owes Oracle just tens of millions of dollars, a fraction of the $2 billion Oracle is seeking.
The jury trial is expected to last six weeks.
The corporate-espionage allegations show how dirty the fight between Oracle and SAP has become as they square off for more of the business of managing corporations’ day-to-day computing chores.
It also highlights Oracle’s changing role in the business software industry. In the process, Oracle has made some bitter enemies, particularly SAP.
Oracle has been on a $40 billion shopping spree over the past six years, snapping up companies that have thrust Oracle into selling business applications, an SAP stronghold.
Oracle’s main business has historically been…