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FBI Watching Oracle-SAP Trial

Posted by samzenpus on from the keeping-an-eye-on-things dept.

angry tapir writes "An FBI agent has been in the courtroom each day this week watching the Oracle-SAP trial, suggesting US law enforcement continues to take an interest in the case. SAP said in 2007, when Oracle filed its civil lawsuit against the company, that the Department of Justice had requested documents related to the matter from SAP and its TomorrowNow subsidiary. SAP said at the time that it would 'fully cooperate.' In a court filing in August, SAP said there was an 'ongoing investigation' by the DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into 'some facts and circumstances that are involved in this matter.'"

6 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. It's the Larry Ellison Parade by christoofar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Too bad it's not a jury of dimwits that gets to determine the award. Then they'll have to ask themselves in a conference room if Larry's crocodile tears are worth excising a large sum of money from one of Germany's largest companies and giving it to a douchebag who already has loads himself.

    Maybe if there's some scarlet twist to this suit that hasn't been made public yet----like SAP had intended to modify Oracle's code to make the database columns with German identifiers like SAP's?

    I cannot tell you with what joy I have going into transaction SE38, then digging through ABAP code, then trying to figure out what column identifiers (like LOGIKZW, STABPRRT) means...

    1. Re:It's the Larry Ellison Parade by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      While I don't think Larry is a nice guy, and figure he probably IS a giant egotistical ass, in THIS case he is in the right. You buy sioftware A you are allowed packages A-f. If you want G-Z that costs an extra "premium support" contract. What the company that SAP was stupid enough to buy out did was set up a bank of servers to crawl ALL the Oracle servers and grab ALL the files, whether their customers had paid for the Premium package or not, and then undercut Oracle by offering the Premium package (which they had ZERO rights to) at a steep discount.

      In this case it would be like going to an OEM that had rights for Windows 7 Basic and offering them Ultimate for $5 a pop, simply because you were able to snatch a copy off of MSDN. Software has licenses and levels whether you like it or not, and in this case they took those that had bought the bottom tier product and gave them all the top tier goodies. I'm sorry but SAP is screwed, the only question is how big a check they are gonna have to cut. You'd think a company of THAT size would have checked out the business they were buying before shelling out the bux just to make sure it was legit.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    2. Re:It's the Larry Ellison Parade by christoofar · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I don't dispute that at all. SAP owes money. Question is how much. Did SAP really capitalize and make any gains off the back of Oracle that warrants a gigantic payout by SAP? That's what the trial is all about.

      SAP did make some very smart buys by the way. BusinessObjects was probably their best purchase ever and probably was a huge thorn in Oracle's butt... and Leo was lucky to be present on the closing of that deal. Oracle has yet to come up with a decent fully-integrated BI suite to match what BO users are doing with that software. And now that BO is permanently married to SAP, Oracle has to steer their customers away from what is actually quite a nice product.

    3. Re:It's the Larry Ellison Parade by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I think the jury needed is that one that decided 24 songs downloaded and shared == 1.5 million US dollars. I wonder what kind of an award they would give to Oracle for TommorowNow downloading and sharing all of that expensive software with its "customers"? Probably a lot of quatloos.

    4. Re:It's the Larry Ellison Parade by mobby_6kl · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's why we replaced him with two CEOs! As an SAP employee, I can't say Leo did everything right, but it's hard to blame everything on him since he was CEO during the worst recession in recent times.

  2. RE: FBI Watching Oracle-SAP Trial by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    There has been much questionable behavior between Oracle and the Chinese Central Committee in the last 19 months to date.

    Intercepts indicate exchange of TOP SECRET ROUGH data by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to Chinese Central Committee Officials.

    The FBI wants to know if the transmissions from Oracle to the Chinese Central Committee was for the money transferred from China Central Bank to Bahamas Bank to an account owned by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

    Oh dear.