In a UK case, the England and Wales High Court ruled that the use of a vendor’s API to access and extract the customer’s own data constituted a use of, not just the API, but also the vendor’s underlying application. As a result, the customer is required to have a separate application license for each individual who is using the customer’s applications that access the customer’s own data via the vendor’s API.
London-based Diageo has been a SAP customer since 2004. Subsequently it built two Salesforce apps that pull data from it’s own mySAP Business Suite database, housed on premises. However, it’s not quite that simple. Diageo licensed and uses the SAP PI interface to generate simulated transactions for extracting their data. Diageo’s intention is clear: “We just want our own data,” but the method is convoluted–necessarily so, given SAP’s notoriously sophisticated underlying data structures.
Sure, Diageo could have used other non-SAP tools to extract the data. But SAP (and other app vendors) could also be more magnanimous in allowing its customers to use its API for doing so, without the need to license every third-party application user accessing their own data. A £54,503,578 (about US$61 million) bill for accessing one’s own data does seem a bit steep.
But I’m not here to judge, just to warn that the courts seem thoroughly confused on the issue of data ownership and rights. This isn’t the only case of this type. In Australia, for example, a Telstra customer has been prohibited from getting access to his own usage data.
The result: organizations have begun rejecting solutions from vendors that contractually inhibit their ability to extract their own data.
This has particular ramifications for custom analytics solutions and data science, where pulling data from within packaged applications is required. Should all analytic application users be required to have licenses to the business apps that generate and store the operational data? I don’t think so.
Other recommendations:
In short, even though it may be your data, getting it out of megavendor applications or service providers may prove to be contractually and litigiously costly. So be sure to avoid the kind of technical debt that comes with failing to negotiate or understand contract terms related to accessing your own data.
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Doug Laney is the Data & Analytics Strategy Innovation Fellow at West Monroe Partners, where he helps clients generate greater value from their information assets. Doug originated the concept of Infonomics and is the best-selling author of "Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage."
Doug is a former Gartner Distinguished Analyst and three-time Gartner Thought Leadership Award recipient, co-founder of the Deloitte Analytics Institute, adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Gies School of Business, and frequent speaker at industry conferences.