Vishal Sikka faces Teradata suit for stealing' trade secrets

Bengaluru: Vishal Sikka has been invoked again, but not in connection with Infosys or Panaya this time. Sikka was CEO of the company between August 2014 and August 2017. Ohio-based cloud analytics firm Teradata Corporation has filed a lawsuit against German software maker SAP AG, in which it has accused Sikka, who used to be the CTO of the company, of being aware of stealing trade secrets for building the Hana platform, from a terminated joint venture product between the two firms. 

Teradata alleged that SAP quickly developed and released HANA, SAP's flagship database offering, by misappropriating Teradata's Intellectual Property.  Teradata argued that SAP's theft of intellectual property enabled it to speed the release of HANA and sales of the platform reached $2 billion in 2016 and it generated hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues from licensing.  HANA helped SAP to revive its product offerings in the market and Sikka was considered the brand behind the analytics platform. The lawsuit said that key SAP employees including Sikka were aware of and supported SAP's misappropriation of Teradata's trade secrets during the development of HANA. 

The suit filed at the US District Court for the Northern District of California said, in developing HANA, SAP faced the same challenges which Teradata and SAP faced during the Bridge Project and which Teradata engineers solved - the speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of interoperation between SAP's front-end software and an MPP database engine as it attempted to store and analyze massive amounts of data.

SAP entered into a joint venture with Teradata in 2008 with the aim of gaining access to its intellectual property and creating a competing database product that it then tried to coerce its customers to use, said the lawsuit. Though, SAP terminated the project in 2011, the lawsuit said the German software major has built a business by creating a competing product.  The lawsuit further said, “On information and belief 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 optimizing the execution of analytical queries and the speed of data storage and retrieval on large-scale databases."

Over at least the last decade, SAP has used its powerful position in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Applications to gain entrance to and quickly grab market share in the Enterprise Data Analytics and Warehousing(EDAW) market, in which it previously had essentially no presence, it said. SAP's strategy began in 2008, when SAP leveraged its position in ERP Applications to lure Teradata into a purported joint venture in order to gain access to Teradata's valuable intellectual property. The purpose of the joint venture-a purpose which Teradata now knows was a false one on SAP's part-was to combine SAP's ERP Applications suite and BusinessWarehouse reporting tool (SAPBW) with Teradata's industry-leading "massively parallel processing"(MPP) architecture for EDAW. SAP then stole Teradata's tradesecrets (accumulated by Teradata over the course of four decades in the EDAWspace), and used them to quickly develop and introduce a competing (though inferior) product, alleged Teradata.

While it was actively partnering with Teradata on the Bridge Project, SAP also was developing its own competing database solution-HANA. In the summer of 2009, just months after the BridgeProject formally began, SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner and then CTO Dr.Sikka announced their goal of revitalizing SAP's lacklustre and outdated product offerings by developing a new, faster database architecture. Dr. Sikka quickly restructured SAP's engineering teams to develop and deploy HANA in less than a year, an extremely short time frame for a project of such magnitude, it further argued. Meanwhile Reuters on its website quoted SAP as saying that it was surprised by the Teradata complaint. SAP may issue a statement once it has reviewed the lawsuit, which seeks an injunction, unspecified damages and other legal relief available under the law. Also, SAP co-founder Plattner slammed Teradata's claims as "monstrous and laughable." Deccan Chronicle has reached out to Sikka through an email, but he was not available for comment.