Vendor publishes benchmarking results; the competition objects
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 1/1/2004 7:00:00 AM
When enterprise application integration vendor Sonic Software published what it describes as a routine report outlining how its products stack up against a particular competitor, Sonic soon found itself facing off with that competitor in court.
The competitor, TIBCO Software, filed suit in California Superior Court alleging that Sonic's publication of the report constitutes an unfair and deceptive business practice.
The report in question, JMS Performance Comparison: SonicMQ® vs. TIBCO Enterprise™ for JMS, is a comparative benchmarking analysis of Sonic and TIBCO Software's competing enterprise messaging solutions. Sonic claims its benchmarking tests proved that Sonic's SonicMQ enterprise message server can handle more messaging traffic than TIBCO's solution.
The report was published last summer. By fall, TIBCO had filed its lawsuit. It also asked for a temporary restraining order seeking to stop Sonic from distributing the report.
In its lawsuit, which did not ask for specific damages, TIBCO claimed that Sonic violated terms of TIBCO's software license, which specifies that TIBCO products can only be downloaded for a company's internal use. In addition, TIBCO officials said the benchmarking test was not valid because it was conducted at Sonic's offices, and not at an independent lab.
"The lawsuit is a bit surprising because we've published results of benchmarks our competitors weren't thrilled with before, and various competitors have published benchmark results we weren't thrilled about," says Tim Dempsey, a Sonic VP. "That's the nature of this industry."
The United States District Court for the Northern District of California ultimately denied TIBCO's request to restrict publication of the report. The court ruled that any showing of irreparable harm is "entirely speculative." Still, TIBCO's original lawsuit stands, although no hearing date has been scheduled.
A TIBCO spokesperson said the company could not comment on the matter.
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