SAP to shutter TomorrowNow unit charged in Oracle's $1B lawsuit

After failing to work out a deal for selling TomorrowNow, SAP has now decided to shut down its acquired customer support division, embattled for more than a year now by a lawsuit charging that TormorrowNow employees hacked Oracle's Web site and improperly downloaded documents, posing as Oracle customers.

The European software giant today announced plans to wind down TormorrowNow's operations by October 31, after officials said last November that selling off TormorrowNow was SAP's top choice among "several options being weighed."

In a statement today, a SAP spokesperson conceded that selling the customer support unit would have been "an extremely complicated transaction for both the seller and the buyer."

As previously reported in BetaNews, however, Rimini Street -- a competing company founded by ex-TormorrowNow executive Seth Raven -- was at one time widely quoted in the media as interested by buying the beleaguered SAP unit.

"The answer is yes, but," said Dave Rowe, Rimini Street's vice president of marketing and alliances, in an interview with BetaNews last December. "We are still interested. But we have to be careful of the value of what we are obtaining." At the time, Rowe mentioned the prospect of large-scale customer defection from TomorrowNow as a factor that could potentially undermine its value.

Yet as SAP prepares today to close down TomorrowNow's operations, the division has reportedly still managed to retain about 225 customers, many of them holdovers from Oracle's unfriendly PeopleSoft acquisition back in 2003.

These customers have stuck with TormorrowNow despite the availability of support for their PeopleSoft and JD Edwards enterprise software from entities ranging from small competitors like Rimini Street to large consultancies such as Accenture.

At this point, the costs of Oracle's lawsuit could be devaluing TormorrowNow as much as anything. Oracle estimated last month that SAP's damages from the lawsuit might amount to more than $1 billion.

Oracle is charging TormorrowNow with corporate theft, accusing the SAP unit with giving customer service documents stolen from Oracle's Web site to SAP.

Now, TormorrowNow customers are up against just what they've tried to avoid. "Our goal is to assist our customers in transitioning to a new support provider, including Oracle, without a disruption to their support," said TormorrowNow Executive Chairman Mark White, in a statement today.