The Bundeskartellamt announced on July 30, 2026 that it had closed a preliminary investigation into SAP without opening formal abuse proceedings, finding no sufficient evidence that Europe's largest software company was unlawfully restricting rivals' access to data held in its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (Bundeskartellamt, case B7-1/25/15). The decision is a rare piece of good news for a company that has spent much of 2026 fighting a parallel, and far more consequential, antitrust battle in a California federal courtroom.
What the regulator actually found
The inquiry followed complaints from software vendors — chief among them Munich-based Celonis, the market leader in process mining — alleging that SAP was making it harder for customers and third parties to extract data from its ERP systems, and self-preferencing its own process-mining product, Signavio, in the process. The Bundeskartellamt's preliminary review concluded otherwise: it found that "various permissible and practical ways" still exist to extract data from SAP systems, that SAP's newly published API pricing policy does not eliminate previously available extraction routes, and that SAP offers licensing tiers without Signavio at lower cost — undercutting the claim that free or bundled Signavio access was being used to foreclose competitors (heise online).
Bundeskartellamt president Andreas Mundt was careful not to close the door entirely: "Companies must generally be able to use their own data in third-party applications. With large software platforms, non-discriminatory access to data is crucial to competition," he said, adding that the authority will keep monitoring the market and can reopen the matter if SAP's interfaces narrow or new licensing barriers emerge. SAP, for its part, welcomed the outcome, saying the ruling confirms that "customers and partners have sufficient and permissible technical options to extract data from SAP systems and use it in solutions from other providers" (SAP News Center).
The steelman: interoperability complaints are not frivolous
Celonis has a genuine grievance, and it deserves to be stated plainly before dismissing it. Celonis and SAP were partners until SAP bought a rival process-mining firm, Signavio, in 2021 — a deal EU regulators cleared partly on the strength of SAP's assurances that it would keep its ecosystem open. Celonis argues those assurances have since eroded, and enterprise software markets are exactly the kind of environment where dominance can calcify into lock-in: switching ERP vendors is expensive, migrating years of transactional data is harder still, and a platform owner that controls the pipes has structural leverage over anyone building on top of it. That is precisely the theory of harm the EU's Digital Markets Act and Germany's own Section 19a regime were built to address, and it is not an unreasonable one.
Why the venue matters as much as the verdict
What makes this case analytically interesting is not just the outcome but the legal track it ran on. Since 2021, Germany's Section 19a GWB has let the Bundeskartellamt designate platforms of "paramount significance for competition across markets" and subject them to lowered evidentiary burdens and ex-ante conduct rules. Only five companies carry that designation — Alphabet/Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft — all reached via a formal finding of cross-market dominance (Bundeskartellamt). SAP is not among them, and this case did not attempt to add it. Instead, the SAP-Celonis inquiry ran through ordinary abuse control under standard German and EU competition provisions, where the regulator had to build an actual evidentiary record — market alternatives, pricing structures, technical realities — rather than start from a presumption of dominance-driven harm.
That distinction cuts in favor of the proportionate, evidence-first model this publication has consistently argued for over ex-ante gatekeeper regimes. Section 19a exists because Brussels and Berlin judged that, for a handful of platforms with genuinely unmatched cross-market reach, waiting for a fully litigated abuse case is too slow to prevent durable harm. But extending that lowered-burden logic to every large enterprise software vendor with an unhappy competitor would invert the presumption of innocence that ordinary antitrust law is built on — and this case shows why that would have been the wrong tool here. The facts, once actually examined, did not support the abuse theory: real extraction paths exist, and SAP sells Signavio-free licenses at a discount, precisely the sort of factual nuance an ex-ante regime is poorly suited to weigh case by case.
The real test is still in California
The more consequential fight is proceeding under ordinary adversarial litigation. Celonis sued SAP in federal court in San Francisco on March 17, 2025, alleging monopolization of a "data access" aftermarket and illegal bundling of Signavio; a judge dismissed the original complaint but let Celonis refile, and in a subsequent ruling declined to dismiss the amended claims, sending most of them toward discovery (Bloomberg Law). Discovery will surface internal SAP pricing and engineering decisions that a regulator's preliminary inquiry cannot compel. If Celonis's allegations hold up under that scrutiny, the Bundeskartellamt has explicitly left itself room to revisit its own conclusion. For now, though, the more measured, fact-specific German process reached a more measured, fact-specific German result — and that is a feature of proportionate enforcement, not a loophole in it.