So the other shoe drops. Four months after admitting one of its subsidiaries downloaded Oracle documents it didn't have legal rights to, SAP is doing everything it can to yank out and destroy that thorn in it's paw known as TomorrowNow.

I'm not surprised, since back in April, just a month after Oracle filed its lawsuit against SAP claiming "corporate theft on a grand scale," SAP CEO Henning Kagermann acknowledged concerns about TomorrowNow's innocence in the matter. "We have policies in place to ensure obligations as management," Kagermann had said during an interview at the Sapphire user conference, adding that SAP was doing its own investigation. "Nevertheless, having policies is one thing, having them enforced is another thing," he said. "We have to have a complete picture."

SAP's version of a complete picture came in July, when it filed a response to Oracle's lawsuit. SAP said personnel from TomorrowNow--a company it acquired that provides services for Oracle's JD Edwards and Peoplesoft products--had indeed downloaded thousands of documents from Oracle's site on the behalf of its customers. As buyers of Oracle products, TomorrowNow customers had rights to some of those support documents, SAP said, while admitting that TomorrowNow also had downloaded some documents related to applications not licensed by those customers, for reasons unclear. But it claimed those documents stayed in TomorrowNow's separate systems and no one from SAP got access to them.

That's a different picture from Oracle's allegation that SAP employees pretended to be Oracle customers to log on to its Web site and copy proprietary technical and customer-support data so it could provide lower-cost services to those customers, with the eventual goal of luring them over to competing SAP products.

To read more about TomorrowNow developments, and leave your $0.02, visit the InformationWeek Blog.

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Tomorrow's CIO
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Google For IT?
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Get Better Results from your IT investments
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