Last calendar month federal jury mind awarding Oracle Corp. $1.3 billion in its collective theft lawsuit against SAP AG could prove destructive to both enterprise users and third-party support providers, psychoanalysts and IT executives say.

Oracle filed the case against SAP in 2007, charging the German vendor'snow-shuttered TomorrowNow subsidiary with the electronic theft of "thousands of proprietorship, copyrighted software products and other secret materials" used by Oracle's support organization.

SAP indicated that it will charm the award, which several analysts called excessive in light of the small size of TomorrowNow.