Oracle and SAP fail to settle TomorrowNow lawsuit

Oracle and SAP held settlement talks Monday in their TomorrowNow lawsuit but failed to reach an agreement that would end the case, an SAP spokeswoman said.

The scheduled meeting was held behind closed doors at the U.S. district court in San Francisco where the case is being heard, she said, declining to give further details. A spokeswoman for Oracle did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Oracle recently took depositions in the case from SAP CEO Henning Kagermann and co-CEO Leo Apotheker, but it is still waiting to question other executives, including former president Shai Agassi, according to a joint discovery statement filed on Friday.

SAP has made 9 terabytes of documents available for Oracle's review, according to the statement, but the two sides are squabbling over which documents are relevant to the case and how Oracle should have access to them.

Oracle sued SAP last year, accusing employees at its TomorrowNow subsidiary, which provides third-party Oracle support services, of illegally downloading Oracle patches and other materials and using them to win over other Oracle customers.

News that the two sides failed to reach a settlement deal comes as no great surprise. SAP has seemed eager to settle the case, but Oracle has been steadily expanding its complaint, alleging recently that SAP executives knew of TomorrowNow's "illegal business model" when they bought the company.

SAP has admitted that TomorrowNow staff made "inappropriate downloads" from Oracle's Web site but has denied the widespread pattern of wrongdoing that Oracle alleges. SAP announced in July that it would close the TomorrowNow unit after failing to find a buyer.

The companies are scheduled to hold a discovery conference on Friday, followed by a conference call with the district court on Oct. 20. The trial data is currently set for February 2010.

SAP and Oracle have both posted documents from the case at their respective Web sites.

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