Is SAP about to take the same sort of battering in the press from Oracle that has made HP’s board quail recently? Not if it can help it.
Late on Friday, SAP asked a Californian court to put a gag order on Oracle’s legal counsel ahead of the scheduled November 1 start of the trial to decide damages in the TomorrowNow case. But even if it can silence Oracle’s lawyers, SAP probably has a bigger problem on its hands: Larry Ellison, who shows no inclination to hold back in public.
Oracle is seeking $2bn for TomorrowNow’s admitted unauthorised access to its systems. The company, which sold maintenance support for Oracle software, was acquired by SAP as a way to get in a foot in the door with Oracle customers. SAP does not contest the claims, just the amount of the damages.
The transgression was the subject of Ellison scorn in an email to us recently. While unleashing a tirade against HP over its removal of CEO Mark Hurd (now an Ellison lieutenant), the Oracle boss did not miss the chance to take aim at SAP as well:
SAP has already publicly confessed and accepted financial responsibility for systematically stealing Oracle’s intellectual property over a long period of time. Much of this industrial espionage and intellectual property theft occurred while Léo [Apotheker] was CEO of SAP.
SAP, trying to silence what it claims could be prejudicial publicity ahead of the trial, makes no mention of these comments. Instead, it takes aim at a New York Times piece on the same issue that came out several days later.
In it, columnist Joe Nocera also lambasted HP’s board for taking on Mr Apotheker, who, he felt, must have been aware of the breaches at TomorrowNow. Only after the piece was published, according to a note later added to the column, did Nocera realise that Oracle’s chief counsel on the case is the prominent lawyer David Boies. Nocera’s fiance is head of communications for Boies’ law firm.
“If generated by a lawyer’s publicist,” the SAP motion argues, this is the sort of thing courts in the past have frowned on.
Plugging any leaks coming from Boies’ office is one thing. But getting Larry Ellison to hold his tongue in public will be a tougher job. Just ask HP.
