New HP chair in row with NYT over old lawsuit
Who would have thought that an enterprise support lawsuit between SAP and Oracle would be the center of a major dust up between the New York Times and Hewlett-Packard chairman Ray Lane?
Boomtown's Kara Swisher has a scathing letter from Lane to the New York Times over columnist Joe Nocera. At issue is HP's CEO Leo Apotheker's role with SAP's TomorrowNow unit. In a nutshell, Oracle bought PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards to begin an acquisition spree. SAP got too cute and bought TomorrowNow, which offered third party support for Oracle products. Nevermind that both SAP and Oracle live off software maintenance and third party support is a big business model killer for them.
From there, Oracle tried to sue SAP's face off. Neither party really wanted all of those enterprise agreements going to court. SAP acknowledged TomorrowNow's guilt so the damages could be resolved. In a nutshell, Oracle wants a few gazillion dollars. SAP scoffs at that and is looking to hand over a few million.
Read more of "SAP-Oracle TomorrowNow hubbub center of HP-NYT duel over Apotheker" at ZDNet.