Rivals SAP AG and Oracle Corp. both appeared to get some of what they wanted yesterday from U.S. District Court Judge Martin Jenkins, who ordered that a trial arising from Oracle's lawsuit accusing SAP of "corporate theft on a grand scale" will begin on Feb. 9, 2009, and should last four weeks.
The judge's order, delivered on Tuesday at the first case management conference on the suit, seemed to satisfy SAP's desire, expressed in earlier court filings, for a relatively quick trial and limited discovery interviews. Oracle, however, got what it wanted when Jenkins declined to limit discovery to SAP's TomorrowNow subsidiary, which, Oracle says, was responsible for inappropriately downloading information from Oracle's customer support Web site.
SAP has said that while TomorrowNow did engage in some inappropriate downloads, the parent company had no knowledge of this due to SAP's policies isolating customer information collected by TomorrowNow from SAP. For that reason, SAP had asked to have discovery limited to the actions of TomorrowNow.
Oracle, however, has questioned whether SAP followed its own "firewall" policies separating itself and TomorrowNow, and has asked for the latitude to question SAP AG officials.
In his order, Jenkins did not restrict discovery to TomorrowNow.
SAP and Oracle also have disagreed over limits on the number of discovery interviews and the length of the pre-trial discovery period. Oracle, in earlier filings, said it needed at least 80 depositions and an 18-month discovery period to get to the bottom of the case, and pushed for the trial to begin on Sept. 25, 2009.
SAP, on the other hand, argued that only 20 depositions by each side were necessary, and that the trial could begin sometime after Sept. 30, 2008.
Judge Jenkins essentially split the difference on the trial date, settling on Feb. 9, 2009, about 23 months after Oracle originally filed its suit. The judge sided with SAP on the number of depositions, limiting them, for the time being, to 20 for each side.
Oracle's original lawsuit, filed March 22 in U.S. District Court, charged that SAP and its TomorrowNow subsidiary, beginning in late 2006, engaged in "corporate theft on a grand scale" by illegally downloading the support material from Oracle's Customer Connect Web site on behalf of SAP's customers. The suit contends that the allegedly illegal downloads unfairly enabled SAP "to offer cut-rate support services to customers who use Oracle software, and to attempt to lure them to SAP's applications software platform and away from Oracle's." Oracle has asked the court for unspecified damages and legal costs.
While Oracle has attempted to portray SAP's actions as amounting to a massive corporate theft, SAP has insisted that they amount to nothing more than isolated mistakes by a subsidiary — and claims that those mistakes have been corrected. SAP has asked for the case to be settled out of court by a mediator, something Oracle has rejected, pending discovery.
In his courtroom yesterday, Judge Jenkins seemed to be wavering between Oracle's and SAP's view of the seriousness of the case.
"Those two [scenarios] don't necessarily fit," Jenkins told attorneys during a public hearing. "It is a tale of two different stories."
The judge did, however, allow that Oracle may be able to prove that SAP's actions represent serious misconduct, "more like a securities case."