The verdict follows an 11-day trial that captivated Silicon Valley with the drama of the two biggest business-software-applications vendors battling in court. Top executives including Ellison, Oracle co-President Safra Catz and SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott appeared in the witness box.

The battle appears not to be entirely over, however, and SAP suggested its appeal could take a long time to play out. "This will unfortunately be a prolonged process and we continue to hope that the matter can be resolved appropriately without more years of litigation," it said.

SAP never denied that TomorrowNow had from an Oracle website, although it did initially deny knowing about it. The trial was to determine how much SAP should pay.

TomorrowNow provided low-cost support services to customers of JD Edwards and PeopleSoft, which Oracle had just acquired when SAP bought TomorrowNow in 2005. Oracle's lawyers argued that SAP felt threatened by the acquisitions and bought TomorrowNow as a way to undercut Oracle's maintenance revenue from those applications, and to try to lure customers to SAP's own software.

The jury was given wide latitude in deciding how much damages to award. It apparently bought Oracle's argument that SAP should have to cover the cost of a "hypothetical license" -- or whatever it would have had to pay Oracle to license the stolen software at fair market value.