SAP's Signavio hit with function injunction in Germany

A German court has issued an injunction banning SAP from providing certain features of its Signavio product, following a legal challenge from process mining biz Celonis.

The ruling only applies to implementations in Germany, but is part of a broader legal tussle between the two companies over intellectual property.

This case focuses on software which helps companies understand their own complex business processes in order to improve them and help prepare for an application migration.

The Munich Regional Court ruled against SAP for infringing a Celonis patent covering the technology which determines the lead time between process stages of a process instance.

The court also asked SAP to provide more information and offer financial statements about its alleged infringement.

In a statement, an SAP spokesperson said: “The court’s ruling relates to one specific function within SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, not to the product as a whole.

SAP Signavio Process Intelligence remains available to customers.

S/4HANA Cloud migrations are not affected.

SAP is working to ensure that there is no disruption to our customers.” SAP added: " SAP respectfully disagrees with the Munich court's ruling and has appealed the decision.

SAP has separately challenged the validity of the asserted patent before the Federal Patent Court.

In fact, the Munich court's decision represents only one of several ongoing disputes between SAP and Celonis, including patent actions brought by SAP in Germany and the United States.

SAP’s first priority is ensuring that there is no disruption to our customers, and we will address all related matters through the appropriate legal channels." Celonis specializes in process mining, building software designed to gather data from people's interactions with business applications.

It aims to uncover how organizations’ 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.