lustratus LiteBytes

On Feb 9th, Oracle and Teilhard Technologies…

…announced a patent-sharing agreement on the use of data-sharing technology, following some legal battles. But the question now is, how many other vendors in the integration space will be affected by the same issue?

According to the Teilhard site, the legal activity surrounded a patent held by Teilhard Technologies, US Patent 6,195,662. The patent is reproduced at the Teilhard site. Looking at this patent more closely, although not explicitly stated in the announcement it could well be that Oracle has ended up having to license this patent to cover its ETL and data warehousing products.

Basically, for those not interested in delving through the legalese of the patent itself, it covers a mechanism for handling the exchange of data between heterogeneous systems. Essentially, data is picked up, mapped into a generic format, manipulated (eg Merge, Append, etc) transported and then mapped into the target format. The generic format trick ensures that source and target are decoupled.

Thinking about this, it seems to me that there must be quite a few ETL and data warehousing type products that do the same thing. Data transformation tools also might be affected – for example Microsoft DTS. Not being a lawyer, I am not sure about the next point, but since XML could be regarded as a ‘generic’ format then does this also mean any product mapping source data into XML and then back again is also treading on this patent?

It will be interesting to see what happens next. This could be the tip of an iceberg, resulting in a ripple of similar agreements over the next 6 months.

Steve