SAP and Oracle agreed to the payout Thursday in a filing with the 9th U.S. District Court of Appeals, in which SAP has already reportedly paid Oracle an additional $120 million in court costs.
After a three-week trial in November 2010, a jury found the German software provider guilty of illegally downloading software and customer documents from Oracle through SAP’s TomorrowNow branch. The initial ruling put SAP’s damage payout at $1.3 billion, though an appeals judge later threw out that claim amount, calling it “grossly excessive.” At that time, SAP had requested a verdict closer to $408 million, and a federal judge gave Oracle the option of accepting a $272 million judgment to close the suit and avoid a new trial.
SAP closed TomorrowNow in 2008 after the downloads were discovered.
It was the second notable federal court action involving Oracle this week, after a separate decision Thursday found that the vendor is obligated to continue development of software for HP’s Itanium servers. Oracle stated it plans to appeal that ruling.
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
