The hot seat was blazing for SAP co-Chief Executive Officer Bill McDermott today, as the Oracle lawsuit brought against the company has finally led to an apology. Under cross examination by Oracle attorney David Boies in the trial to determine damages for the theft of Oracle IP by SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow, McDermott admitted and apologized for the data theft.  AllThingsD reports on some additional details regarding today’s trial:

“To be fair, McDermott did offer some testimony supportive of SAP, noting that TomorrowNow didn’t generate a lot of software sales. “Not only was it not a big driver of software sales, it wasn’t a very successful,” he said.

It was a statement made by SAP’s co-CEO, though its former having gone missing a few weeks back, heightening the drama around this case.  Oracle had been trying to get hold of him, as Apotheker has not made any official appearance since pertaining to the court case. An HP official replied by saying that Oracle is doing the best they can so as to interfere with Apotheker’s duties and responsibilities at HP, even mentioning the word ‘harassment’.

On the other hand, Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison said that Apotheker’s reason for having gone missing is obvious, since Apotheker knew about the SAP theft and is trying to keep himself as far as possible so as not to appear in court and testify.

The conflict between SAP and Oracle started on the ground of how much should SAP’S subsidiary TomorrowNow should pay for having stolen customer support documents and used them in order to undermine Oracle’s price for similar services. Oracle claimed $4 billion as damages and the dispute has gone to court and Apotheker might as well be cited to testify.

Apart from the disputes at the high level, Oracle has launched today Oracle Solaris 11 Express, a product for the cloud services after five years of developing and implementing the concept.

“We are excited to announce the release of Oracle Solaris 11 Express to enable our customers to deploy the new advanced features of Solaris 11 across a broad set of platforms, as well as Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle.

“Through the same engineering disciplines that achieved    legendary mission-critical reputation for Oracle Solaris, we are expecting Oracle Solaris 11 to further reduce any downtime by being quicker and easier to deploy, maintain and update; and deliver a highly efficient, virtualized operating system to meet the scale and performance requirements of immediate and future virtualization and Cloud-based deployments.”