Vishal Sikka named in Teradata lawsuit against Germany’s SAP
22 Jun 2018
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US-based business and cloud analytics firm Teradata has filed a lawsuit against Germany’s SAP for allegedly stealing trade secrets, copyright infringement and anti-trust violations related to its flagship product. It also named former Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka as being complicit during his stint as the chief technology officer (CTO) of the German enterprise software company.
In the 35-page complaint filed with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Teradata has alleged that SAP had misappropriated its intellectual property (IP) to build its HANA platform and subsequently coercing customers to use its product, jettisoning Teradata, thus leading to the loss of revenue, profit and market share.
Sikka, CTO of SAP between 2007 and 2014 and considered the mastermind behind HANA, is accused of being "aware of” and supportive of “SAP’s misappropriation of Teradata’s trade secrets during the development of HANA”. The product helped SAP revive its offering in the market. Sikka subsequently joined Infosys before leaving the Bengaluru-based company in August last year.
Teradata says that while building HANA, SAP faced the same set of challenges faced by a joint venture between the two firms 2009 and 2011 – speed, efficiency and effectiveness of interoperation between SAP’s front-end software and an MPP database engine as it attempted to store large amounts of data.
“To overcome this challenge during HANA development, the HANA developers, at the direction of Dr Sikka, utilised the same solution developed by Teradata’s engineers and developers during the Bridge Project — using Teradata’s trade-secret techniques for optimising the execution of analytical queries and the speed of data storage and retrieval in large-scale databases,” the lawsuit alleges.
“...during HANA development, the HANA developers, at the direction of Dr. Sikka, utilised the same solution developed by Teradata’s engineers and developers during the Bridge Project — using Teradata’s trade-secret techniques for optimising the execution of analytical queries and the speed of data storage and retrieval in large-scale databases,” the complaint reads.
The lawsuit also says that Sikka restructured SAP’s engineering teams to develop and deploy SAP HANA in less than a year, “an extremely short time frame for a project of such magnitude.”
Sikka had run into a similar controversy last year while he was helming Infosys, when SAP came down on the company’s artificial intelligence platform MANA, saying it sounded similar to HANA and a trademark violation. The matter was buried when Infosys rechristened the platform as Nia and presented it as a new upgraded system.
SAP, which has a market value of more than $140 billion, is shifting customers increasingly to integrated cloud-based services. The Teradata suit relates to its earlier generation of HANA database products, hosted on company premises, which are still widely in use.
An email inquiry sent to Sikka by The Times of India did not immediately elicit a response. A Reuters report quoted SAP as saying that it was surprised by the Teradata complaint and that it might offer a comment once it had reviewed the lawsuit.
Sikka’s exit from Infosys last year was unceremonious, after a long drawn battle with the promoters of the company over the controversial acquisitions of two firms — Panaya and Skava.
