The dot-com bubble may have burst and the emerging economic slowdown may be squeezing some smaller technology companies, but Santa Ana-based Ingram Micro Inc. is trying to hold Internet and other businesses accountable for their bills and contracts with some recent court disputes.
In one case, filed March 2 in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana, Ingram Micro is seeking $7.4 million for alleged breech of contract from pcOrder.com Inc. and Trilogy Software Inc., an Austin, Texas-based company that spun off pcOrder in 1999 and reacquired it in December.
Ingram Micro contracted with pcOrder for e-commerce software and consulting services in 1998. The move was designed to allow Ingram Micro sales staff to monitor product availability and pricing.
At the time, Ingram Micro executives touted the pcOrder software package as the next link in the company’s e-commerce offerings, creating a business-to-business service that improved efficiency and lowered costs. Ingram Micro is the computer industry’s largest distributor with $30 billion in annual sales and some 3,012 employees in OC.
As a result of pcOrder’s merger back into Trilogy, the software programs Ingram Micro acquired are no longer being serviced, according to the company’s lawsuit. Also, Ingram Micro charges in its suit that pcOrder and Trilogy took over some 60 servers and related gear maintained in Austin that Ingram purchased to support its software packages. The Ingram Micro dispute comes on the heels of several shareholder lawsuits filed against pcOrder late last year over its sale to Trilogy. PcOrder, whose stock once traded as high as 74, was bought by Trilogy for about 6 a share. Like other e-commerce companies, pcOrder has struggled and saw flat revenue and a loss in the third quarter.
Ingram Micro Spokesman Alan Buis declined to comment on the case.
The distributor also recently filed several smaller lawsuits against other companies, including Mountain View-based iBuyline.com Inc. and Tokyo-based Procom International Co., for allegedly not paying bills for products it delivered to them.
In another case, Ingram Micro is suing Millennium 2K Solutions Inc. of Irvine after it claims it was stuck with $1.2 million worth of returned computer products it bought from the company. According to the suit, Millennium guaranteed the products but allegedly failed to stand behind them after Ingram Micro tried to take them back.
In yet another suit, Ingram Micro is defending itself in a claim filed in December by Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. of Irvine. In this case, the lawsuit targets Ingram Micro and its customer PeoplePC Inc. in San Francisco. Toshiba contends that the two companies owe it $2.9 million in reimbursement for higher memory costs and for failing to purchase the minimum 175,000 computer units agreed upon. n
