The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a bid by Europe’s largest software company 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 it violated U.S. antitrust law by tying 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, and SAP refuted all its claims. A trial has been scheduled for April 2026 on Teradata’s claims, as well as a counterclaim lodged by SAP against Teradata accusing it of patent infringement.
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“We are disappointed the Supreme Court has declined to review these important legal issues. We remain confident in our position, reject Teradata’s claims and look forward to resolving the matter in the trial court,” SAP said in a statement.
SAP sells “enterprise resource planning” software to companies, which use it to manage data used in daily activities like finance and supply-chain operations. Teradata makes a database that provides analytics on such a large amount of data.
SAP was accused of illegally tying sales of its business operations software to a new product that was developed to compete with Teradata’s database. 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.
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SAP told the Supreme Court in a filing that the 9th Circuit “applied too stringent a standard in evaluating Teradata’s claims.” It also said that 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 allows companies to compete effectively.
Teradata urges the justices to reject SAP’s appeal, disputing that SAP’s two products were integrated. It also denied there was any divide among the federal appeals courts about which rules judges should use to evaluate antitrust lawsuits.
Previously, Celonis had filed a lawsuit against SAP, accusing it of anti-competitive behavior. Celonis, a process mining company, claimed SAP was abusing its dominant position in the ERP market to exclude competitors systematically.