Phil Wilmington, CEO of OutlookSoft, felt that Hyperion’s case had no merit from the start and suggested that Hyperion merely resorted to legal matters to slow down OulookSoft’s momentum.
The truth is that Hyperion doesn’t have a competitive strategy in the field against OutlookSoft, he said.
He claimed that OutlookSoft had been winning two out of three competitive deals against Hyperion. 48% of those are Hyperion customers, Wilmington said.
Santa Clara, California-based Hyperion filed the patent case against OutlookSoft in December 2004 in district court in East Texas. The company sought up to $112m in damages, alleging that OutlookSoft infringed upon two of its patents that related to how data is input, stored and extracted by performance management systems.
This week the same court ruled that OutlookSoft did not infringe upon Hyperion’s patents in question, and indeed that Hyperion’s patents were invalid.
Patent cases are usually tedious affairs that drag out for years. But the dire technicalities of the evidence presented by both sides took the boredom level to a new high as it combined IT with accounting.
Wilmington said that Hyperion’s reaction to the ruling spoke volumes of the company’s intentions from the outset.
They said that the patents were not never critical to their business and were set to expire 2008, he said. The case presents a picture of a larger competitor that doesn’t have a competitive strategy for an update sometimes chose the legal systems as competitive weapon.
Hyperion officials were unavailable for comment.
The business intelligence space has seen its fair share of litigation that has kept many US lawyers off the streets. Last week a MicroStrategy Inc also came out on the right side of a five-year long patent case filed by Business Objects SA.
