Teradata accuses German rival of stealing trade secrets
Teradata, a database management system and analytics services company, has accused a Germany-based competitor of stealing trade secrets.
Teradata filed its complaint of trade secret misappropriation and copyright infringement against computer software company SAP on Tuesday, June 19 at the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
According to the claim, SAP and Teradata entered into a joint venture in 2008 to combine the companies’ database systems.
Teradata said that, during the joint venture, it provided SAP with confidential trade secret information and conducted training sessions on Teradata’s solutions for SAP’s developers.
The claim alleged that SAP then stole these trade secrets to produce a competing database management system called SAP HANA.
Teradata reportedly shared trade secrets which included techniques for “optimising the speed and efficiency of the distribution of vast amounts of data and complex analytical workloads across massively parallel processing units”. The US company also said it gave SAP access to its database systems for research purposes.
Teradata alleged that SAP engineers were simultaneously working on the joint venture and developing SAP HANA, despite requirements that Teradata’s confidential information solely be used for the partnership.
In addition, Teradata accused SAP of copyright infringement relating to its Teradata Express software, a free developer version of the Teradata’s database.
Teradata said it has reason to believe that “SAP engineers downloaded Teradata Express and ran debugging or other tools against the software to circumvent Teradata’s protections and uncover Teradata confidential and proprietary techniques for database processing and analytics”.
Upon the release of SAP HANA, Teradata said that SAP terminated the joint venture.
In a press release, Teradata said that it supports competition and innovation.
“SAP’s conduct, however, is neither pro-competitive nor innovative. We believe seeking relief through legal action against SAP is a necessary step to protect the rights and interests of our shareholders and all of our other stakeholders, including our customers,” it added.
SAP told WIPR that it was surprised to learn about the complaint. A spokesperson for the company said it may issue a statement once it has reviewed the claim.
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