Oracle vs License Consulting: Round two

It’s been a while since my last post on the legal case that Oracle initiated against License Consulting. As said, during the preliminary injunction the court ruled that Oracle’s mission resembled a fishing expedition and their request to obtain the data would not be honored without a full fledged trial. Under Dutch law, Oracle must complete the full legal procedure until the very end, so the show must go on.

But time has passed, and Oracle no longer has a commercial interest in legally pursuing this case. As such, Oracle tried to settle. The settlement agreement drafted by Oracle said that License Consulting:

a) May not talk about the details of the settlement,
b) May not countersue Oracle’s for it’s acting,
c) Must pay for the inconveniences itself, including the legal costs.

Although those terms are pretty much one-sided I was thinking about closing this case. The only condition I had was that I would have a sit-down with Oracle’s regional Managing Director, Oracle’s LMS Manager Europe South, and the regional Legal Counsel to discuss what had happened. The MD could not attend. Because I know him as an honorable man and I owe him my respects I was a little disappointed about that news.

To start off the meeting I wanted to bring forth some suggestions about Oracle’s internal operation. For example, some LMS and Sales staff tend to increasingly tell clients and partners ‘better not work with License Consulting’. Which is actually good for me: It’s like Oracle saying to a client ‘PLEASE DON”T TALK TO SAP’, so the first thing they would do is call SAP. But I have enough to do, and the existing clientele recommending License Consulting is the only salesforce I long for. I continued by telling that if an Oracle legal counsel says to a client “You must sign, or I (the legal counsel) will lose my job” in a dispute, it’s embarrassing and a vendor like Oracle should know better. Lastly I mentioned a scenario where my lawyer attended a meeting, where an Oracle salesrep -let’s call him Mr. B – was insinuating to the meeting attendees that I had not left Oracle voluntarily. Mr. B only met me on one occasion, and probably did not know that right after my voluntary departure I was immediately hired by Oracle Benelux. To be precise, I was asked to train the Oracle salesforce and the partners on licensing issues. To sum up the meeting: in good faith I gave Oracle valuable information about themselves that are by no means to my benefit at all. Much to my surprise however, both the LMS manager and the legal counsel showed little interest in my suggestions. On the contrary, they continued the meeting by saying about the raid that, in any similar future event, Oracle would do the same thing all over again in exactly the same way. So, raid my house and use my personal name instead of my business, and pursue me in court. In their words: “It was entirely factual and had nothing to do with me as a person. It was strictly business.”

With the meeting going this way, my thoughts were and still are somewhat like this:

1) If I go and settle this on their one-sided terms, will Oracle go and just do this over and over again if they run into a fight with a customer I happen to work with? In that case I could just as well give them the key to my house.
2) How impersonal was that raid really? If I would have provided a service to a client on behalf of one of the Big 4 Audit Firms – which is entirely possible – : Would Oracle have raided their offices as well? I think not.
3) If I look at it as strictly business, the way Oracle supposedly did: Am I not better off to continue the court case than signing the aforementioned conditions? In many ways, I have nothing to lose and only to win.
4) If I don’t sign, I retain my rights to pursue Oracle in regard to this issue, so next time they might think twice before they do this all over again in exactly the same way.

I appreciate that Oracle could not guarantee this from happening again, certainly not in writing. This is why I had decided prior to the meeting that if anyone at Oracle would at least show the slightest bit of human understanding for me being slightly upset about the fact that they pursued me in person and not my company, had make bailiff’s sniffle through my private home, and sued me privately and directly (and not my company) and not as part of their actions against my client but towards me as a private person: I would handover the (already signed) settlement agreement right there. But with the meeting evolving in the way it did, I simply would not be able to face myself in the mirror if I would settle under those conditions. So I shook hands and left.

To be continued…

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