Teradata names former CTO Vishal Sikka in IP-theft lawsuit against SAP

US analytics and cloud solutions provider Teradata on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against technology giant SAP, alleging that the German company had indulged in misappropriation of its intellectual property (IP) to build its HANA platform.

The 35-page long complaint filed with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, also claimed that Vishal Sikka, the former Chief Technology Officer of SAP, was “aware of and supported SAP’s misappropriation of Teradata’s trade secrets”. Sikka who is widely credited as the creator of SAP HANA subsequently joined Infosys before leaving the Bengaluru-based company late last year.

In the complaint, Teradata said that SAP had entered into a joint venture with it a decade ago with the intention of gaining access to its IP. The company alleged that stealing of its IP helped SAP speed up the development of its HANA platform.

“...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 read.

While SAP could not be reached for its comments for this story, a Reuters report quoted the German software 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 as well, after a long drawn battle with the promoters of the company over the controversial acquisitions of two firms — Panaya and Skava. 

While even an audit committee and Nandan Nilekani gave Sikka and the board a clean chit for the Panaya acquisition, Infosys, in its most recent quarterly results announced the sale of the Israeli firm, possibly to bring an end to the controversy which started with an anonymous whistleblower complaint.

Meanwhile, in a statement issued on Friday, Vishal Sikka said: "As with all my endeavours, my work with SAP HANA was carried out with the highest integrity, professionalism and respect for all obligations towards trade secrets and intellectual property. Although this lawsuit is not directed at me, I categorically deny the baseless and outrageous allegations made by TeraData that attempt to diminish the hard work, passion, and the irrefutable and fully legitimate achievements by the Hana team, including myself.”