The battle between US-based data and analytics firm Teradata and German tech giant SAP SE has intensified as its former top boss Vishal Sikka junked charges levelled against his former company. On Thursday, Teradata had lodged a formal complaint against SAP in the US District Court for the Northern District of California over alleged misappropriation of trade secrets, copyright infringement and antitrust violations. Vishal Sikka, whose previous term with India's tech conglomerate Infosys was marred with controversies and differences with the company founders, termed these allegations "baseless and outrageous".
Slamming the charges, Sikka in an emailed statement to PTI said: "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".
The complaint, which names several top executives of SAP, alleges misappropriation happened during the development of HANA. SAP's HANA platform handles both transactions and analytics in memory on a single data copy. It also converges a state-of-the-art database with advanced analytical processing, application development capabilities, data integration, and data quality.
After the development of HANA 2011, the company had strengthened its positions across the globe as a major software corporation, and Sikka was a major force behind the project.
The complaint states that SAP engaged in a decade-long campaign of anti-competitive behaviour, to the detriment of the parties' customers and Teradata alike. "SAP lured Teradata into a purported joint venture in order to gain access to Teradata's valuable intellectual property. SAP's purpose for the joint venture was to steal Teradata's trade secrets, developed over the course of four decades, and use them to quickly develop and introduce a competing though inferior product, SAP HANA," said the complaint.
The company has alleged that upon release of SAP HANA, SAP promptly terminated the joint venture, and is now attempting to coerce its customers into using HANA only, to the exclusion of Teradata. The company has demanded an injunction barring SAP's illegal conduct, monetary damages, and "all other legal and equitable relief available under the law and which the court may deem proper".
The company said that SAP could not have so quickly developed and marketed HANA without its "theft of Teradata's trade secrets". "Now, using the fruits of that theft and its position in ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications, SAP is attempting to foreclose Teradata from supplying EDAW solutions to many of the largest corporations in the world."
In reply to the allegations, SAP has said that it is surprised by the complaint, and will comment only after reviewing the complaint document.