Antitrust proceedings: US Supreme Court allows Teradata's lawsuit against SAP

The US Supreme Court has rejected a request by SAP for a hearing after the Walldorf-based software company appealed to the US Supreme Court to avoid a trial for violations of US competition law after all. This is scheduled for April 2026. The legal dispute is based on allegations made by Teradata, a provider of analytical databases, against SAP. According to the lawsuit, the Walldorf-based company is putting other providers disadvantaged by bundling its HANA database with the ERP system S/4HANA.

As the news agency Reuters reports, SAP won the trial before the District Court of Northern California but ultimately lost to an appellate court in San Francisco. In the application that has now been rejected, SAP argued that the district court's interpretations could restrict innovation in the US tech sector. Ultimately, however, customers would not benefit from this. Companies that invest large sums in research are only interested in developing such software packages if they are economically viable. Ultimately, these would reduce the unit costs and therefore also the development costs without incurring costs for the customers.

Interestingly, the Walldorf-based company is relying on a previous judgment against Microsoft from 2001, which concerned, among other things, the bundling of Windows with Internet Explorer. According to this ruling, the District Court of Washington, D.C., unanimously recognized at the time that the application of the so-called “per se” rule, on which the District Court of San Francisco is also relying in the current case, could impair innovation to the detriment of end customers. The US companies Microsoft and Meta published a letter supporting SAP's argument.

In its decision, however, the Supreme Court argues that the two main concerns named by SAP in its petition are irrelevant to the current proceedings. The judges also rejected the comparison with the court proceedings against Microsoft. At that time, a different decision would have been reached based on different facts.

Joint venture used to steal intellectual property?

The legal dispute between the two companies goes back to a Teradata lawsuit from June 2018. In addition to the antitrust allegations, SAP is also alleged to have stolen patents from the former partner. According to the allegations, the software company had only used the joint venture founded in 2006 to gain access to Teradata's intellectual property.

The news magazine “Der Spiegel” and the ARD magazine “Fakt” jointly analyzed court documents in 2015 to prove this. At the time, the research was based on the investigations of an internal SAP auditor. In discussions with HANA developers, the auditor had come to the conclusion that the database system infringed the intellectual property of other companies.

In its original lawsuit from 2018, Teradata also drew attention to the short time in which the database system had been developed at the time. SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, on the other hand, explained in an interview that HANA is based on the Hyrise database, which was conceived by his software institute HPI and is available as an open-source product.

(dmk)