Celonis has secured a significant win in its process mining patent battle against SAP in Germany. The Munich Regional Court has issued an injunction against SAP, banning the company from offering relevant technology from its Signavio Process Intelligence software in Germany. This ruling marks the first decision in a broader patent and antitrust battle spanning Germany, the UPC, and the US.
The court’s judgment was made in favor of Celonis in its patent infringement suit against SAP, with the panel finding that SAP’s Signavio Process Intelligence software infringes Celonis’ EP 3 139 274 patent. This patent protects a computer-implemented method for determining net throughput times between process steps in a process instance, enabling the exclusion of non-business hours from the calculation of process durations.
Patent Infringement Details
The dispute centered on the interpretation of several features of claim 1, particularly whether SAP’s software stores the process log in main memory in the manner required by the patent. The court agreed with Celonis that a column-oriented storage format meets the patent’s requirement that process steps be stored in neighboring addresses sorted by a time attribute.
The judges also rejected SAP’s argument that the patent requires a globally unique identifier for each process step, holding instead that uniqueness arising from the combination of the process instance identifier and the step description is sufficient. On validity, the panel found that the cited prior art neither anticipated the claimed invention nor rendered it obvious.
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Broader Dispute and Consequences
SAP has filed an appeal against the decision, while Celonis intends to enforce the injunction. The Munich ruling forms part of an escalating dispute between the two software companies, with Celonis specializing in process mining software and SAP entering this market in 2021 through its acquisition of Berlin-based Signavio.
In spring 2025, Celonis filed an antitrust action against SAP at the Northern District Court of California, alleging that SAP charges excessive fees for third-party access to data stored in its systems. The US court dismissed most of the claims in June 2025 but allowed Celonis to amend and refile. The parallel UPC proceedings will soon continue, with a Düsseldorf local division hearing scheduled for the end of November and a Munich hearing following in February.
Legal Representation and Proceedings
Hogan Lovells Cadwalader acted for claimant Celonis, with a team including Düsseldorf litigation partner Andreas von Falck and patent attorney and partner Alexander Klicznik. SAP was represented by a team of Jones Day, with Munich partner Gerd Jaekel in the lead. The firm also represents SAP at the UPC and in the US proceedings.
In addition to the legal representation, several law firms are handling the proceedings in the US, including Jones Day, Klarquist, and Paul Hastings. The in-house team at SAP, including Lukas Colberg and Lucas Dreesen, is also involved in the German proceedings, while Samir Pandya and Kevin Prey are handling the proceedings internally at SAP in the US.
