S SE won an early round in a lawsuit filed in the US by one of Europe’s most valuable startups accusing the German technology giant of illegally wielding its market power.
A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday dismissed antitrust claims by Celonis SE that S blocked access to data in its systems to give an unfair advantage to its own Signavio unit. The judge said Celonis can try to revise and refile the claims.
Celonis and Signavio both offer process mining software to find inefficiencies within business enterprise systems and eliminate them. S is the world’s largest vendor for Enterprise Resource Planning software, including bookkeeping and procurement solutions.
The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After the court held a hearing a week ago and the judge spoke about how he intended to rule, a spokeswoman for Celonis said via email the company was pleased interference claims would move forward. “We believe that businesses should have the freedom to select the best technology solutions” without “interference, misinformation or unfair restrictions,” she said, adding Celonis would continue to defend these principles.
A spokeswoman for S said in an email at the time that “S continues to reject Celonis’ claims” and S would “continue to vigorously defend” itself and its innovations.
US District Judge Vince Chhabria allowed a claim of interference with contractual relations to move forward and said that pretrial fact-finding known as discovery can begin immediately.
Chhabria wrote in his ruling that Celonis alleged “that S’s conduct has caused multiple Celonis customers to consider not renewing their contracts and has required Celonis to reassure those customers to prevent them from doing so.” The judge said this was “plausibly a disruption to Celonis’s contractual relationships.”
William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University, said Celonis appeared to be testing a novel antitrust theory.
“It’s a theory of harm that hasn’t been broadly accepted by the courts, and it’s a theory of harm that’s been developed to try to overcome earlier jurisprudence that gives dominant firms a lot of freedom to do what they want,” he said.
The case is Celonis SE v. S SE, 3:25-cv-02519, US District Court, District of Northern California .
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
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