Business Objects Partners Not Worried About Informatica Patent Ruling

Last month, a patent-infringement lawsuit Informatica filed against Business Objects culminated in a guilty verdict, a $25 million judgment against Business Objects, and a likely injunction barring Business Objects from shipping any future copies of its Data Integrator software with the infringing functionality.

Despite the headline-grabbing bad news for Business Objects, solution providers who rely on Data Integrator say they're not worried.

"We're aware of it, but we're being reassured by our senior representatives [from Business Objects]," said Bill Taylor, the executive vice president in charge of the business intelligence (BI) practice at Insolve, in Austin. "The sense that we're getting from them is that it'll be resolved, no matter what Business Objects has to do to make it go away."

Insolve specializes in serving the insurance industry, and it relies heavily on Data Integrator, an ETL (extract, transform, load) tool used for aggregating data from disparate business systems. So does Andrews Consulting Group, which incorporates Data Integrator in its RapidDecision software.

"My understanding of the legal finding is that it's only for a small component of Data Integrator that, if required, could be removed quickly," said Joe Guerra, director of BI for Andrews Consulting and chief architect of RapidDecision. "It's a feature set that can be turned off, and it's something we could do without. It's not going to dramatically affect us."

'Turning off' the problematic code is essentially what Business Objects has done. Three weeks after the Informatica verdict, the company shipped a new version of Data Integrator with scalability and performance enhancements and new support for Linux. "As part of this release, Business Objects has already proactively removed the one feature targeted by this lawsuit," the company said in a written statement.

Business Objects and Informatica returned to U.S. District Court in San Francisco last week for a hearing on Informatica's request for a Data Integrator sales injunction. "We believe that any ruling on the injunction is essentially moot at this point," Business Objects said, citing its new, non-infringing release.

A ruling on the injunction is expected this week, along with a ruling on Informatica's bid to be awarded treble damages and fees, which could push Business Objects' total bill past $75 million. The case could also indicate trouble for other ETL vendors: If Informatica's patents stand, the company could move beyond Business Objects and pursue infringement claims against other ETL products, such as IBM's DataStage. On the other hand, it could decide to limit its legal actions to the one company with which it's most aggrieved: Business Objects Data Integrator software came from its acquisition of Acta Technology, whose co-founder was a former Informatica employee.

Informatica declined to discuss the lawsuit and its broader patent-enforcement plans.

To solution providers, the whole affair remains opaque -- and no one is sweating over the lawsuit's implications just yet. Insolve was in the midst of pitching Data Integrator to a prospect when news of the $25 million verdict broke. The potential customer didn't bat an eye, Taylor said.

The verdict hasn't affected Business Objects' ETL sales and the company doesn't expect it to, Business Objects CEO John Schwarz told analysts on the company's quarterly earnings call in April.

"It's really in the hands of the lawyers," Andrews Consulting's Guerra said. "It's not something the field-level Business Objects people we deal with are worried about, and we're not worried about it."

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