German software company Celonis is suing SAP, alleging anti-competitive conduct and claiming its systems lack openness.
According to a complaint [PDF] filed in the Northern District of California, Celonis claims SAP has made it more difficult and expensive for third-party software companies such as Celonis to get hold of customer data stored in SAP's business software.
Celonis specializes in process mining, the idea that by gathering data from people's interactions with business applications, organizations can find out how their processes are actually performed, as opposed to how they were designed. For example, during a process mining project, pharma giant GSK discovered around 28,000 different variations for the process of running a sales order.
Celonis was founded in 2011 with early customers including Siemens, the global engineering company.
But in 2021, SAP decided it wanted a piece of the action and bought fledgling process mining company Signavio, in part to help customers move from legacy software systems to the cloud.
Celonis now alleges SAP is using its position as an application provider to gain an unfair advantage in the market for process mining software.
In its complaint, Celonis alleged that SAP's internal documents show that it is "not content controlling the software infrastructure and allowing its customers to decide which additional offerings are best situated for their purposes."
The filing alleges: "SAP has embarked upon an aggressive campaign to exclude third-party application and technology providers from its ecosystem through new charges and fees, arbitrary technical limitations, restrictive policy updates, and self-preferencing of its own solutions at the expense of rivals."
SAP provides business software, including ERP systems, to some of the world's largest companies, including Siemens, BMW, Airbus, and Walmart.
The complaint alleges: "SAP has deliberately sought to exploit its market power over its large, entrenched ERP customer installed base by imposing new policies and restrictions in an attempt to destroy Celonis' business and thereby harm SAP's ERP customers. Given the extremely high costs of switching ERP providers, SAP's ERP customers are effectively locked into the restrictions SAP imposes on how those customers may use their own data on their ERP system. SAP is now attempting to use those restrictions on data access to prevent Celonis from competing with SAP's own process mining company, Signavio."
The Register has offered SAP the opportunity to comment.
There have been indications that both SAP's and Celonis's customers are motivated around the issue of software vendors' openness.
In April last year, Dr Patrick Lechner, BMW's head of process mining and robotic process automation, told The Register that if application and platform vendors were more open, it could help in process mining.
"One topic [for improvement] is that the software stack has to be very open. At BMW, we have got a lot of different software products in place and it's very important that we can really connect them ... both to get the data out and also to analyze the data further," he said. ®