The Small Fish Settle in Juxtacomm versus Ascential Et Al

Vincent McBurney (IBM Information Champion) posted 2/3/2009 |

The mediator has done is job, the previously unbridgable divide between the plaintiff and defendants has been bridged and five have settled.

(Feb 10 News Flash! Information Builders have officially settled, the other parties are still in negotiations, see Information Builders Settles with Juxtacomm and Exits Stage Left free as a bird)

This is good news for all parties as is reduces the work load of this case and narrows down the focus to those mega vendors who have the biggest stake in the data integration market.

The five vendors to settle:

Open Text Corporation

Information Builders, Inc.

CA, Inc.

Fiorano Software, Inc.

InterSystems Corporation

These are not small software vendors, in fact CA (Computer Associates) is one of the largest software companies in the world, however most of these companies had a very small share of the data integration market.

The full text of the Pacer filing:

Pursuant to the Court’s order this case was mediated among the Plaintiff and all Defendants over various dates beginning on January 13, 2009 with completion on January 29, 2009. All appropriate parties appeared and participated.

Agreements in principle have been reached between Plaintiff and the following Defendants:

Open Text Corporation

Information Builders, Inc.

CA, Inc.

Fiorano Software, Inc.

InterSystems Corporation

Final settlement and case disposition documents as to these Defendants are being prepared for filing with the Court. Mediation has been suspended, with mediator involved settlement discussions continuing among the Plaintiff and the remaining Defendants. Additional reports will be filed as necessary to report the progress of these efforts.

Signed this 3rd day of February, 2009.

/s/ James W. Knowles

JAMES W. KNOWLES, MEDIATOR

The surprising omissions from the settlement list are Metastorm who are trying to IPO and Software AG who tried hard to settle before the Discovery phase of the trial. I previously harboured a suspicion that Teilhard Technologies are asking for a higher settlement price from those companies that compete against it’s new startup venture Purus in the business rules processing market.Fiorano is a direct competitor to Purus and they have settled here so it appears that Teilhard are offering reasonable settlement agreements to competitors.

InterSystems are the vendor that originally used the Groklaw community to find prior art - Groklaw - InterSystems' Request to Pick Your Brains for Prior Art. Looks like they wont need to use that Prior Art!Although all defendants in this case have pooled resources and worked mostly through a single legal team so they should have all the Prior Art that the departing defendants collected.

A good day for Teilhard – the first meaningful settlements single they settled with Oracle.I wouldn’t expect a big influx of money from this – I would estimate tens of millions of dollars as none of these are megavendors or major ETL players.It will be interesting to see whether the settlement includes an ongoing licensing agreement and how that impacts the list prices of products from those vendors.Since none of them have traditional ETL products they may be looking at a discounted license.

This is a good day for Teilhard but they still have not bagged a megavendor – SAP, Microsoft, IBM.They still have not bagged a data integration powerhouse – Informatica or Sybase.The court case will still go ahead in November of this year and out of the Markman Hearings being held this week we should get a better idea of claims construction and whether this is a battle for ETL licenses or a battle for the entire field of data integration software.

So round one to Teilhard, round two is underway.

The JuxtaComm are a subsidiary of Teilhard Technologies, a 10+ year old company that reinvented itself from a software firm to a patent revenue firm.This new direction was started in 2004 and saw losses in 2004 and 2005, made 2006 almost a break even year and should see a profit in 2007.