Business and cloud analysis firm Teradata has filed a lawsuit against SAP for reportedly stealing trade secrets, copyright violation and anti-trust infringement related to its prime product. It also named Vishal Sikka as the complicit during his stint as the chief technology officer (CTO) of the German enterprise software company.
In the lawsuit filed, Teradata accuses SAP of stealing trade secrets in building its HANA platform and eventually coercing customers to use its product, dropping Teradata, thus leading to the loss in revenue, profit and market share for the latter.
Sikka was the CTO of SAP between 2007-2014 was seen as the mastermind behind HANA, is being accused of being “aware of” and supportive of “SAP’s misappropriation of Teradata’s trade secrets during the development of HANA.”
Teradata says that while they were building HANA, SAP faced the same set of obstacles that it and Teradata encountered while working on a JV between 2009-2011, namely, 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, utilized 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.
Sikka had run into a very similar problem 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 described it as a huge 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, that are still widely in use.
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