Some of the most valuable trade secrets in enterprise software are invisible until someone finds them in the code. In Teradata Corp. v. SAP SE, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 2018, Teradata alleged that SAP had misappropriated its trade secrets relating to enterprise data-warehousing and analytics technology, technology at the heart of Teradata's business, in the course of a collaboration that later turned competitive. The case, which also carried antitrust claims concerning SAP's enterprise software and its HANA database, became one of the highest-profile technology trade-secret disputes of its era.
Finding the trade secrets in the source code
A software trade-secret case lives or dies on a specific, technical question: can the plaintiff show that its protected material actually appears in, or was used to build, the defendant's product? That is not a question a business witness can answer. It requires engineers who can go into large, complex codebases under a protective order and identify where specific protected techniques, structures, and implementations reside, then distinguish genuine use of a trade secret from independent development, shared industry practice, and publicly available material. In a dispute over enterprise-scale data-warehousing software, the volume and complexity of the code make that a substantial undertaking.
That identification work, locating the asserted trade secrets in source code, was the core of Barr Group's contribution.
Source-code trade-secret experts for the plaintiff
Barr Group worked for Teradata, the plaintiff, performing much of the behind-the-scenes technical analysis of locating and characterizing the asserted trade secrets within the relevant source code. The work applied the same discipline Barr Group brings to every software trade-secret matter: rigorous, documented source-code examination that ties each finding to specific files and versions, and that separates genuine use of protected material from what the law leaves free. One of Barr Group's experts was prepared and scheduled to testify before the case reached its resolution. The specific findings and work product remain confidential to the matter.
Litigation outcomes
In March 2026, on the eve of trial, Teradata and SAP announced a settlement under which SAP agreed to pay Teradata 480 million dollars, resolving the parties' antitrust and intellectual-property claims (a matter of public record). As with any settlement, the agreement resolved the dispute without a trial verdict on the underlying claims. Barr Group's role was to provide the technical foundation on the trade-secret side: the source-code analysis that a trade-secret claim of this kind has to stand on.
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