SAP Chief Financial Officer of Global Customer Operations Mark White pleaded guilty Wednesday on behalf of his company to charges that employees of TomorrowNow accessed Oracle's customer support portal without authorization and illegally downloaded software and support documents. In a plea agreement struck between SAP's TomorrowNow subsidiary and the U.S. Department of Justice, the company agreed to pay $20,004,800 in fines and submit to three years of corporate probation.

"Twenty million dollars reflects the seriousness of the conduct especially in light of the size of TomorrowNow, the revenues that it earned during its existence and in light of the restitution that is going to be paid in the civil case," said Kyle Waldinger, the Department of Justice's lead attorney on the case.

The $20 million isn't much when compared to the $1.3 billion in damages a civil jury ordered SAP to pay Oracle last year after arriving at a guilty verdict over related allegations.

SAP acquired TomorrowNow, a seller of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards support services, in early 2005, shortly after Oracle acquired both software companies. In the years after the acquisition, some of TomorrowNow's 160 employees secretly logged into Oracle's customer support portal, using logins belonging to Oracle customers to download the unauthorized material.

Oracle says they used that information to move PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers to SAP's platform.