SAP plans to "wind down" its TomorrowNow subsidiary, which was the center of a lawsuit filed by rival Oracle.

SAP said it was working with TomorrowNow's more than 225 customers to help them move to other service providers. TomorrowNow, which SAP bought in February 2005, provides support for Oracle and other business applications. Oracle's brands include PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel.

"Our goal is to assist our customers in transitioning to a new support provider, including Oracle, without a disruption to their support during the wind-down process," Mark White, executive chairman of TomorrowNow, said Monday in a statement.

SAP plans to finish closing the operation before Oct. 31.

TomorrowNow was at the center of a 2007 Oracle lawsuit accusing SAP of "corporate theft on a grand scale" because of document downloads by TomorrowNow employees.

The suit, which is pending, claimed TomorrowNow employees "copied and swept thousands of Oracle products and other proprietary and confidential materials into its own servers" using fake logins or credentials stolen from Oracle customers such as Bear Stearns, Honeywell, and Merck. The documents allowed SAP "to offer cut-rate support services to customers who use Oracle software, and to attempt to lure them to SAP's applications software," Oracle charged. Oracle later amended its suit to include copyright and breach-of-contract claims.

SAP acknowledged it bought TomorrowNow in part to lure Oracle customers, but said the downloaded documents were not seen by anyone within SAP. Instead, the documents were obtained on behalf of TomorrowNow customers and not for competitive purposes.