TomorrowNow Execs Gone Today

Oracle’s lawsuit over alleged trade secrets theft by an SAP subsidiary seemed to be on the back burner, but heated up quickly Monday. The company announced that “several managers” and Andrew Nelson, the CEO of TomorrowNow, “have chosen to resign.” Also, SAP said it is considering selling off the subsidiary.

In September, a U.S. District judge set a trial date of February 9, 2009 for the two sides to square off in court barring any settlement of the matter.

SAP said Mark White, who was appointed as Executive Chairman of TomorrowNow in July 2007 will continue in Nelson’s role.

The issues in the case date back to late 2006 when Oracle discovered some TomorrowNow employees were downloading Oracle customer files for the purpose, Oracle says, of taking away some of its lucrative services business. In its complaint, Oracle claims SAP stole intellectual property and violated the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.

SAP has conceded TomorrowNow engaged in “inappropriate” downloads of Oracle support materials, but SAP CEO Henning Kagermann insisted his company did not access Oracle’s intellectual property.

Pund-IT analyst Charles King said SAP may have left the TomorrowNow personnel with little choice but to resign given the bad publicity the case has generated. “The last thing I think any vendor wants to have said about itself is that it’s trying to cop the intellectual property of competitors,” King told InternetNews.com.

Regardless of whether SAP is found guilty of anything, King said the company has to take actions to protect its brand with the trial date so far off. He also thinks TomorrowNow may be a more salable asset without the management involved in the Oracle case still on board.

An SAP spokesperson declined to comment in detail on the announcement.

“The departures are of a personal matter and not something we can discuss publicly,” she said in a statement sent to InternetNews.com. “We are focused on managing through the changes so that TomorrowNow’s obligations to its customers are met. And as this is an active litigation, we cannot provide much further information at this time. Discovery is ongoing and the next case management conference takes place on Feb 12, 2008.”

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020

• Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 05, 2020

• The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  August 14, 2020