Forex

Escalating its rancor with rival SAP AG, business software maker Oracle Corp accused SAP of knowingly buying and then embracing an illegal operation set up to steal Oracle's products and customers.

The allegations emerged in the latest documents filed in a fraud case that Oracle brought against SAP last year in San Francisco federal court. Oracle fired its volley the day before Germany-based SAP is scheduled to report its second-quarter earnings.

The 16-month-old lawsuit focuses on TomorrowNow, a software maintenance specialist that SAP bought in 2005 to counter Oracle's $11.1 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft.


TomorrowNow offered to support PeopleSoft products at lower prices than Oracle did, an advantage that SAP hoped to use to lure customers away from its biggest rival in business applications software. Those products automate a wide range of administrative tasks.

But Oracle alleges that TomorrowNow relied on a "corrupt" strategy that included breaking into Oracle's computers to obtain confidential information.

After reviewing internal SAP documents obtained during the discovery phase of its lawsuit, Oracle became convinced that its rival's top executives were warned about TomorrowNow's outlaw behavior before the acquisition and then embraced the conduct after buying the subsidiary.