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Stakes rise in Oracle-SAP copyright fight

US appeals court on Friday ruled that Oracle be given a choice between $356.7 million or a new trial for its copyright lawsuit against German rival SAP.

Stakes rise in Oracle-SAP copyright fight
Photo: DPA

The settlement amount would be less than a third of the $1.3 billion SAP was ordered to pay the Silicon Valley giant by a jury in November 2010.

The ruling Friday by a panel of three judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco came in response to a legal move made by Oracle in late 2012.

The appeals panel backed the trial judge on several points, including herdecision to override the big-money damages award based on the reasoning that the jury used "undue speculation."

"We conclude, however, that the district court erroneously set the remittitur at $272 million," the appeals judges ruled. "We therefore vacate and remand with instructions for the district court to offer Oracle the choice between a $356.7 million remittitur and a new trial."

After a jury ordered SAP to pay the Silicon Valley giant $1.3 billion, US District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton called the figure "grossly excessive" and slashed it to $272 million.

Oracle rejected the amount and filed an appeal.

The case dates back to 2007, when Oracle accused SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow of a massive scheme to download and copy its software.

Prior to Hamilton's decision, the two firms agreed to a $306 million settlement figure — but with the understanding that it was simply a maneuver to end the case in the lower courts and allow an appeal to proceed.

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TECHNOLOGY

SAP reaches for sky with cloud computing

German software giant SAP is hoping to improve its position in cloud computing with the acquisition of US web-based software company SuccessFactors.

SAP reaches for sky with cloud computing
Photo: DPA

SAP will pay $40 per share, a premium of 52 percent on the closing price in trading in New York on Friday. The $3.4 billion (€2.5 billion) deal should help the German company catch up on cloud computing, the rapidly growing sector where data and processes are hosted remotely on the Internet.

The California-based SuccessFactors produces software used by companies to review employee performance. The company, which was founded in 2001, has more than 3,500 customers and a total of 15 million paying users.

“While our growth remains primarily organic, where we can innovate faster with acquisitions, we take action. In this case, to become a cloud powerhouse,” SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott told journalists and analysts on Saturday.

“By acquiring SuccessFactors, SAP puts itself into a much stronger competitive position in human resources applications and reaffirms its commitment to software-as-a-service as a key business model,” Paul Hamerman, an analyst at technology research group Forrester, told Reuters.

Forrester estimates the cloud computing market will grow from $40.7 billion in 2011 to more than $241 billion in 2020.

DPA/The Local/smd

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