Vishal Sikka, the former CEO of Infosys and his former employer SAP are being dragged to court by cloud analytics firm Teradata accusing them of data theft. Vishal Sikka was the Chief Technology Officer at the German software giant before joining Infosys.
The charges slapped against SAP and Sikka include copyright infringement, trade secrets misappropriation and violation of antitrust laws. The case has been filed in a court in California, US.
The issue behind the lawsuit is the database management system HANA, for which SAP and Teradata entered into an agreement in the year 2008. Teradata alleges in its lawsuit that SAP had lured it into the deal to gain access to its intellectual property and SAP just closed the deal as soon as the product got developed.
Teradata further accuses SAP of running a sustained campaign which has damaged its own reputation vis-à-vis its (Teradata’s) customers. Hence the lawsuit.
On including Vishal Sikka in the case, it is understood that Sikka, as the CTO was an executive board member and was fully in the loop with regard to the misappropriation of data by SAP and he and his team were quite in the thick of it.
Interestingly, it is Sikka’s connection with the HANA project that landed him the CEO’s job at Infosys, since the Indian software major was largest system integrator for SAP HANA.
The lawsuit now seeks to stop SAP’s illegal conduct, order SAP to pay monetary damages and other remedies it is entitled to under the law. For the record, SAP clocks a revenue of $30 billion while the figure for Teradata stands at $2 billion.
However, Vishal Sikka denied IP theft charges, terming them ‘baseless and outrageous’, and said the work on HANA platform was carried out with highest integrity. He further added that the allegations made by TeraData attempt to diminish the hard work, passion, and the irrefutable and fully legitimate achievements by the Hana team.