Oracle sues SAP

MAKER OF DULL storage software, Oracle has sued SAP, the company which produces business software which is so esoteric which no one is really sure what it does.

According to USA Today, Oracle claims that the German software maker is responsible for "corporate theft on a grand scale" involving thousands of Oracle software products.

It claims that SAP used Oracle customer log-ins for Merck and Honeywell to gain unauthorised access to a customer support website. From there SAP employees stole copies of software and other confidential materials.

Included in the alleged theft were software updates, patches and other support services which SAP flogged on to Oracle customers for an “off the back of a lorry price” if they switched to SAP.

Oracle only noticed that the theft was happening after a techie spotted that there was some heavy downloading on the customer support site from some companies after they had switched to SAP. Honeywell had 20 downloads a month in the three years before switching but this increased to 7,000 in less than two weeks after changing over to SAP.

Oracle claims that an SAP subsidiary was using log-ins of multiple customers, combined with fake e-mail addresses and fake phone numbers to access the site. It was not difficult to see that the emails were faked, one of them was “test@testyomama.com”, the court documents claim. µ