SAP filed its response to Oracle's complaint in the TomorrowNow matter. Pretty arcane legal stuff with 3 major points:
- There has been - and going forward will be a stronger "Chinese Wall" between SAP and the TN Unit
- TN, on behalf of customers, can appropriately download documents from Oracle sites
- Some of the TN downloads were inappropriate
It is "a wart on the left eye brow of an ant" defense - that Oracle is taking a small infraction and amplifying it into "rhetoric and hyperbole" as the document describes it.
SAP does take occasional shots at Oracle: " TN does not force its customers to pay artificially inflated prices to fund Oracle's future acquisition and integration of products that customers do not want or need"
SAP's case would be so much stronger if, as I have written here, TN also offered SAP customers an option. Because there are plenty of customers who "pay artifically inflated prices to fund SAP's Oracle's future development, acquisition and
integration of products that customers do not want or need"
So while the two of them spat, it is good to see Rimini Street, an independent third party maintenance firm, report it doubled its client base in first half of 2007. It is good to see NetCustomer, another firm which provide third party maintenance, present at PeopleSoft gatherings. And it is great to see NetSuite file to go IPO.
Third party maintenance and SaaS - the Rolaids and Alka-Seltzer for a decade of big ERP parties.
Update: NetCustomer announces an "Independence Day" offering - independent from the feuding two
