Context:
- Patents:
- In the summer, SAP filed its first-over offensive European patent lawsuit, asserting EP3913496 (“Enabling data access by external cloud-based analytics system”) against Celonis in the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC) Dusseldorf Local Division (LD).
- Later, SAP sued over four patents in Delaware (October 6, 2025 ip fray article). Celonis responded in the Eastern District of Texas (October 13, 2025 ip fray article) and in Europe, where the Munich-based company is asserting EP3139274 (“Method for determining a net lead time between process stages of a process instance”) in the Landgericht MĂĽnchen I (Munich I Regional Court), a court that has already received more than 275 such filings this year (November 24, 2025 ip fray article), and EP3765962 in the UPC’s Munich LD.
- Antitrust:
- The dispute started with a U.S. antitrust complaint by Celonis that SAP already appeared to have on the brink of a near-complete dismissal, but after a spectacular revival (October 28, 2025 ip fray article), that case is going forward.
- SAP furthermore has to justify its conduct to European watchdogs. The European Commission’s (EC) Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP) opened a formal antitrust inquiry into SAP’s bundling of maintenance and support services, and the related fees and termination rules (September 25, 2025 EC press release). And just last week, German business weekly Wirtschaftswoche reported that the Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office of Germany) is contemplating an investigation concering the very issue raised by Celonis: access to data by third parties.
To Read The Full Story
Continue reading your article with a Membership
Court and counsel
United States District Judge Vince Chhabria (of the San Francisco division of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California) presides over the case.
Counsel for SAP (in the U.S. antitrust case, though Jones Day is also involved with patent litigation): Jones Day’s David C. Kiernan, Craig E. Stewart, Nathaniel P. Garrett, Tharan Gregory Lanier and Catherine T. Zeng; and Paul Hastings’s Ryan P. Phair, Michael F. Murray and Stephen J. McIntyre.
Counsel for Celonis (in the U.S. antitrust case, though there is an overlap with the U.S. part of the patent dispute): Hogan Lovells’s Michael M. Maddigan, Jennifer Fleury, Justin W. Bernick, Anna Kurian Shaw and Lauren B. Cury; and Farella Braun + Martel’s Christopher C. Wheeler and Alexis J. Loeb.