Celonis vs. SAP Lawsuit: Antitrust, Patents, and EU Probe

The Celonis vs. SAP lawsuit is an antitrust case filed in March 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in which process-mining company Celonis accuses SAP of abusing its dominance in enterprise resource planning software to block Celonis from the data inside SAP systems and steer customers to SAP’s competing product, Signavio. Most of Celonis’s claims survived SAP’s second motion to dismiss in October 2025, and a jury trial is set for December 7, 2026. A separate set of patent suits between the two companies is running in parallel in the United States and Europe.¹²

The Core Allegations

Process-mining tools work by pulling transaction logs out of enterprise software to map how a company actually operates. That makes access to SAP’s data foundational to Celonis, which was originally built to analyze SAP transaction logs. Celonis says SAP began systematically cutting off that access after buying Signavio, a direct Celonis competitor, in 2021.³⁴

The 61-page complaint, filed March 13, 2025, sets out several strands of alleged misconduct.¹ Celonis says SAP threatened customers with prohibitively expensive fees for using third-party data extraction tools while offering Signavio at extremely low cost or for free. It alleges SAP made false or misleading statements to customers about Celonis’s pricing, capabilities, and the risks of using it. And it says SAP broke promises it made at the time of the Signavio acquisition to keep its platform open and not favor its own process-mining tool.⁴

Running through all of it is the lock-in problem. SAP’s ERP systems are deeply embedded in the operations of thousands of large enterprises, and switching providers is expensive and disruptive. Celonis argues SAP exploited that captive base by restricting the technical pathways customers could use to get their own data out, pushing them toward SAP’s in-house tools rather than independent alternatives.¹

The Data-Access Restrictions Behind the Case

Three concrete SAP moves form the factual spine of Celonis’s claims.

In February 2024, SAP updated an internal guidance document known as SAP Note 3255746 to explicitly prohibit third-party tools from using the Operational Data Provisioning (ODP) framework, which had been a standard method for outside integrators to pull bulk data from SAP systems. The updated note warned that SAP might restrict and audit “unpermitted use.” SAP called the notes non-binding, but the practical effect was to steer customers toward SAP’s own DataSphere product.⁵⁶

SAP’s RISE with SAP cloud migration contracts added another layer. Those contracts come with a restricted runtime license that prohibits direct database access, and support for third-party extraction tools is not included by default. Getting that access requires buying a separate enterprise database license that can cost several times more than the runtime license.⁷ Third-party software running in SAP’s cloud environment must also pass SAP’s own architectural and security evaluations, and installing third-party executables, scripts, or agents on SAP-managed servers is prohibited.⁸

In late April 2026, SAP published a broader API policy formalizing much of this. The policy limits customers to APIs published in SAP’s Business Accelerator Hub, prohibits large-scale data extraction outside “SAP-endorsed architectures,” and gives SAP the right to throttle, suspend, or terminate access for noncompliance.⁹

Where the Case Stands

The case is before Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California.¹⁰²¹¹

Two Motions to Dismiss

On June 30, 2025, Judge Chhabria dismissed Celonis’s original complaint but gave the company leave to refile. SAP called the ruling a win, though it was procedural.¹² Celonis filed an amended complaint, SAP moved to dismiss again, and on October 27, 2025, the court let most of the claims proceed.¹³

The claims that survived:

Actual monopolization of a “data access” market inside SAP ERP systems, maintained through non-merit-based exclusion.
Attempted monopolization of the process-mining market, based on incremental restrictions on data access and withdrawn technical support for third-party tools.
Illegal bundling and predatory pricing, because SAP allegedly offered Signavio for free while its actual cost of provision was above zero.
False advertising under both the federal Lanham Act and California law, tied to statements on SAP’s website about Celonis’s pricing and capabilities.
Intentional interference with prospective economic relations and unfair competition under state law.

Two claims were dismissed with leave to amend. The court threw out a tying claim, finding no showing that SAP coerced customers into taking Signavio as a condition of buying its ERP software, and it dismissed a promissory estoppel claim, ruling the alleged promises to keep the platform open were too vague to enforce.¹³

The most legally novel piece is the “data access” aftermarket theory. Celonis argues that access to data inside SAP ERP systems is its own product market, separate from the ERP software itself. Judge Chhabria said he shared “similar concerns” about whether that market definition would hold up, but concluded Celonis had alleged enough at the pleading stage. The court stressed that the theory rests on SAP restricting customers’ ability to access their own data, not on a traditional refusal-to-deal claim between competitors, and reserved the right to revisit the question after discovery.¹³

Settlement Talks and Trial Schedule

An initial settlement conference on October 15, 2025, produced no deal.¹⁴ A second was scheduled for early December 2025, with no reported result.¹⁵ At a June 5, 2026 case management conference, the judge directed the parties to file proposed schedules assuming Celonis’s pending motion for leave to file a second amended complaint would be granted, with a hearing on that motion set for June 25, 2026.¹⁶ Trial is scheduled for December 7, 2026.²

The Parallel Patent Fights

Alongside the antitrust case, both companies have opened patent fronts against each other.

In October 2025, SAP sued Celonis in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, alleging that Celonis’s process-mining software infringes four SAP data-processing patents. The complaint targets the “Object Link” and “PQL Engine” features in Celonis’s Execution Management System and asserts U.S. Patent Nos. 9,697,254; 8,996,492; 11,120,034; and 11,514,007. SAP noted that Celonis gained technical insight into SAP’s systems during a partnership that began in 2016.¹⁷ Celonis filed a partial motion to dismiss on January 2, 2026, arguing that two of the patents cover unpatentable mathematical ideas run on generic computers.¹⁸

In June 2025, SAP filed what it described as its first-ever offensive patent infringement complaint, at the Unified Patent Court’s Dusseldorf Local Division, asserting EP3913496, which covers a method for an analytics engine to access and retrieve data from ERP systems. The case is still in its written phase, with a scheduling order issued in March 2026.¹⁹²⁰

Celonis countered in October 2025 with its own infringement actions in Germany, filing at the Munich Regional Court on EP 3 139 274, which covers a method for determining lead times between process stages, and at the UPC Munich Local Division on EP 3 765 962. Both were pending in late 2025 with no reported rulings.²¹

A Separate EU Investigation

In September 2025, the European Commission opened its own antitrust investigation into SAP. That probe is not part of the Celonis case; it focuses on whether SAP distorted competition in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services related to its on-premises ERP software. The theme is related, in that both proceedings ask whether SAP uses its ERP dominance to foreclose competition in adjacent markets, but the conduct at issue is different. SAP said it believes its practices are “fully compliant with EU competition rules” and does not expect a material financial impact.²²

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