The gloves are off in the increasingly bitter rivalry between two software heavyweights, with Oracle suing SAP for ‘corporate theft on a grand scale’, claiming its rival used customers’ online access codes to steal copyrighted software.

The giant duo are currently crossing swords in the market for software that helps companies automate business functions. Oracle accused its German competitor of gaining repeated and unauthorised access to its password-protected customer support web site. This, the lawsuit charged, then allowed SAP to copy Oracle software products and other confidential materials onto its own servers and compile an illegal library of copyrighted software code.

‘This case,’ read the lawsuit, filed in the US District Court in San Francisco, ‘ is about corporate theft on a grand scale, committed by the largest German software company – a conglomerate known as SAP’.

Over the past three years, Oracle has gone on a software acquisitions spree in order to challenge SAP, which leads the way in applications that help companies automate everything from accounting and inventory management to recruitment. Executives at both corporate leviathans regularly belittle each other’s products and strategies in public.