The Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a bid by Europe's largest software maker, SAP, to avoid a lawsuit by U.S. data technology company Teradata that accused it of violating American antitrust law.
The justices turned away SAP's appeal of a lower court's decision that let Teradata pursue claims that its larger German rival tied sales of business-planning applications to the purchase of a key SAP database that can perform transactional and analytical functions. San Diego-based Teradata makes a rival analytics database.
Teradata filed its lawsuit against SAP in federal court in California in 2018. SAP has denied any wrongdoing. A judge has scheduled an April trial on Teradata's claims, as well as on a counterclaim that SAP lodged against Teradata accusing it of patent infringement.
SAP sells enterprise resource planning software to companies that lets them manage data used in daily activities such as finance and supply-chain operations.
Teradata makes a database that can provide analytics on such a substantial amount of data. The company said SAP customers relied on other tech companies like Teradata to handle the data that SAP's applications produced.
SAP won in the district court, but the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived Teradata's case in 2024. The 9th Circuit said there was a material dispute between the companies that a jury could take up and decide.
SAP said the 9th Circuit's ruling clashed with how another federal appeals court in Washington in 2001 resolved a landmark antitrust case against Microsoft.
In its filing at the Supreme Court, SAP said its two products were integrated, and that such integration benefits consumers and lets companies compete effectively.
Meta Platforms and Microsoft jointly submitted a friend-of-the-court brief backing SAP at the Supreme Court.
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