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."

A Celonis spokesperson told The Reg: “The Munich court’s decision validates our position, finding that SAP Signavio technology infringes Celonis’ patent rights. We will always vigorously defend our proprietary technology and challenge unlawful efforts to stifle fair competition."

It noted that SAP's parallel action nullity action against the patent in question had not yet been decided.

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.

Celonis was founded in 2011 and early customers included Siemens, with projects examining how processes run on the global engineering company’s SAP software. In 2021, SAP decided it wanted in on the same market and bought mining company Signavio, in part to help customers move from legacy software systems to the cloud. The ERP giant does not mandate Signavio for its migrations, but the software is bundled in packages under the moniker RISE with SAP, the lift-shift-and-transform commercial push SAP launched in 2021 to get users into the cloud and on its latest ERP offering, S/4HANA.

The latest ruling is part of a set of legal disputes between Celonis and SAP. In March last year, Celonis filed a lawsuit in the US Court, Northern District of California, claiming the ERP giant had made it more difficult and expensive for third-party software companies to get hold of customer data stored in SAP's business software. Celonis was later allowed to amend and refile its complaint after the US court dismissed most of the claims. A trial is set for September 2027.

SAP has also launched a case alleging a patent infringement action against Celonis at a Düsseldorf, Germany, court. It also filed suit in October last year at the District Court of Delaware over four US patents.

Celonis has launched other cases alleging infringement by SAP, including in a Texas federal district court. ® Updated on October 20 to add a quote from Celonis.