All-Out Attack

The news about Oracle today is reading like a press-release version of that 2001 Japanese cinema classic, Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack.

The software behemoths aren’t destroying Tokyo with fire breath and the like, but there is a lot of bellowing and stomping going on involving three of the biggest names in the biz.

Computer World is running a bit more on the software lawsuit of the year, i.e. Oracle v. SAP AG, with SAP reportedly now hoping to settle with the big O. Oracle v. SAP, a case “about corporate theft on a grand scale, committed by the largest German software company,” in the opening words of the complaint.

Oracle originally brought the lawsuit against SAP in the US Federal District Court in the Northern District of California on March 22. The lawsuit alleged that King Ghidorah – i mean, SAP was guilty of violations to the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, Unfair Competition, Intentional and Negligent Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage and Civil Conspiracy, i.e. they ripped off Oracle data.

The suit alleges that “staff at SAP’s TomorrowNow subsidiary pretended to be Oracle customers in order to gain access to the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customer support web site.”

Last week, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann admitted that “SAP acknowledged that some inappropriate downloads of fixes and support documents occurred at [SAP subsidiary] TomorrowNow. Importantly, SAP affirmed that what was downloaded at TomorrowNow stayed in that subsidiary’s separate systems. SAP did not have access to Oracle intellectual property via TomorrowNow.”

In the Computer World piece, Owens-Illinois global director of IT infrastructure Rodney Masney is quoted as having spoken with Kagermann, who stated that “there were perhaps some procedures not followed, and that significantly increased the amount of data downloaded.”

Who wants to bet that Oracle won’t settle this one out of court?

While these two giants battle it out courtside, in the Mothra role is Microsoft.

Australian IT’s Barbara Gengler has a piece up well describing a Microsoft barrage on Godzillacle via the firms business intelligence product: “SQL Server puts Oracle on notice,” writes Gengler.

Microsoft has been “touting the latest version of its SQL Server database platform as another example of the company’s designs on leadership in the business intelligence world, where it will once more butt heads with Oracle,” according to the piece.

In addition to extensive interviews and analysis, Gengler also offers some sweet numbers as well, including:

• Sales of Microsoft’s SQL Server database were up 28 percent during 2006 (sourced from Gartner, Inc).

• Oracle is the leader in the relational database software market, with 47.1 percent of the total sales. IBM and Microsoft are second and third, respectively.

• In the business intelligence tools market from 2004 to 2006, the top five vendors according to IDC were Business Objects, SAS, Cognos, Oracle and Microsoft.

• The growth leader among the top five was Microsoft, with a 28.1 percent revenue increase in 2006.

Read SQL Server puts Oracle on notice at Australian IT; it’s a good one.

As for Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, check out Amazon.com, i suppose. They have everything.