Celonis accuses SAP of damaging its business
SAP has introduced new rules and restrictions with the goal of destroying Celonis’ business and thus harming SAP’s ERP customers, Celonis argues. Customers, Celonis contends, are more or less trapped in this system because switching ERP providers is generally associated with high effort and expense. SAP is ultimately hindering competition, Celonis says, to gain an advantage for its own process mining solution, which it acquired with the Signavio acquisition.
Celonis was launched in 2011. The following year, the Munich-based company participated in SAP’s Startup Focus program — the starting point of a long-term business relationship between SAP and Celonis. The startup, which ranked 13th on the Forbes Cloud 100 list in August 2024 with a valuation of $13 billion, closely integrated its process mining software with the SAP universe. This involved considerable costs, the lawsuit states. But SAP and its customers benefited. Ultimately, with the help of Celonis tools, it was possible to monitor, analyze, and ultimately optimize processes using data from SAP systems.
When SAP acquired German process mining provider Signavio in 2021, SAP said it aimed to pair Signavio’s integrated, cloud-native process suite with SAP’s Business Process Intelligence to help SAP customers adapt their business processes end-to-end. The strategy would incorporate business process analysis, design, and improvement, as well as process change management.
