Oracle has issued 102 subpoenas to 99 former customers of TomorrowNow, the now-shuttered SAP subsidiary at the heart of Oracle's lawsuit against SAP, according to a court document filed this week.
Forty-nine of the 99 customers have subsequently supplied some 77,012 documents, which SAP is reviewing in order to "appropriately designate any confidential or highly confidential information that may be contained therein," according to the filing by SAP in US District Court-Northern California District.
It was not clear Thursday what type of information the documents contain. None of the customers in question were named in the filing.
An Oracle spokeswoman declined comment Thursday. An SAP spokeswoman did not immediately return a call for comment.
Oracle filed a lawsuit against SAP in March 2007, charging that workers at TomorrowNow, a provider of third-party support for Oracle's PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications, illegally downloaded material from Oracle's support systems and used it to court Oracle customers.
SAP has said that TomorrowNow workers were authorized to download materials from Oracle's site on behalf of TomorrowNow customers, but acknowledged some "inappropriate downloads" had occurred. SAP has also said that Oracle's software remained in TomorrowNow's systems and has denied Oracle's allegations of a wider pattern of wrongdoing.
SAP referred to the TomorrowNow customer subpoenas in one of a series of recent filings related to discovery in the sprawling suit.
"It's a key point to any resolution whether Oracle's bottom line was damaged by former customers turning to TomorrowNow for their [application] support needs," 451 Group analyst China Martens said via e-mail Thursday. "Oracle seems to be struggling to prove that point, hence the resorting to customers. We question the wisdom of that move, which seems overly intrusive to end-users."
The case's next settlement conference is scheduled for Feb. 23, and a trial date has been set for February 2010.
