Is Vishal Sikka Helping Oracle Prepare a Lawsuit Against SAP?
Executive Summary
- When Vishal Sikka joined the Oracle board of directors, Oracle claimed it was his AI knowledge.
- Our research points to a different reason Oracle has hired Vishal Sikka.
Introduction
This article is essentially part two of the article Is Oracle Board Member Vishal Sikka a World Expert on AI?
The end of that article concludes..
Vishal Sikka is not a world expert on AI. In fact, he is not even prominent in space.
Vishal Sikka has a Ph.D. in AI but has not done even close to enough work to be considered anywhere close to what Larry Ellison claimed. This claim by Larry Ellison is yet another attempt to associate Oracle with AI. Who knows if Larry Ellison even believes it. But what Larry Ellison got many media entities to publish is that Oracle has nabbed one of the world’s experts in AI.
Since Vishal got his PhD in AI, Google has since developed products such as TensorFlow which ordinary computer scientist graduates are capable of developing code with. – Markian Jaworsky
We give Larry a 1 out of 10 for accuracy in this claim and award him our prestigious Golden Pinocchio Award.
What is the Actual Reason for Oracle Reaching Out to Vishal Sikka?
The previous article established that Oracle’s official story for their interest in Vishal Sikka does not add up. There is something else odd about the relationship between Oracle and Vishal Sikka. Before joining the board, he had a highly lucrative consulting contract with Oracle, which is described below.
However, in the paperwork announcing Sikka’s appointment to its board, Oracle did disclose that it signed a three-month contract with Sikka’s consulting company, Hang Ten, that pays $2,000/hour. Oracle says the contract will involve between 20 – 50 hours of consulting services and sales support per month, which works out to $40,000 – $100,000 a month. That’s on top of the pay and stock Sikka will receive as an Oracle board member. – TechR
This does not sound right. Why would Oracle pay $2,000 per hour simply for Vishal Sikka’s very ordinary AI knowledge? What does Vishal Sikka have that would interest Oracle to offer him a $40,000 to $100,000 per month consulting contract and a board seat?
A Very Deep Rabbit Hole…on the HANA Project
Well, for starters, Vishal has in-depth knowledge of SAP’s inner workings, but Oracle can and does hire senior executives from SAP regularly.
But Vishal does possess somewhat unique knowledge. And that knowledge is Vishal’s understanding of the HANA program. In fact, Vishal is named in the Teradata lawsuit against SAP, as is covered in the following quotation.
While it was actively partnering with Teradata on the Bridge Project, SAP also was developing its own competing database solution—SAP HANA. In the summer of 2009, just months after the Bridge Project formally began, SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner and then-CTO Dr. Vishal Sikka announced their goal of revitalizing SAP’s lackluster and outdated product offerings by developing a new, faster database architecture. Dr. Sikka quickly restructured SAP’s engineering teams to develop and deploy SAP HANA in less than a year, an extremely short time frame for a project of such magnitude.
In November 2010, Dr. Sikka announced at SAP’s annual user conference, SAPPHIRE, that SAP had begun shipping its HANA product. In May 2011, again at SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference, an SAP customer demonstrated HANA for SAP BW to create what purported to be an EDAW-type environment. SAP’s CTO described this version of SAP HANA as incorporating a “massively parallel” database “with various data processing engines”—a similar type of database architecture as that pioneered by Teradata and used in Teradata Database. SAP announced general availability of SAP HANA in June 2011.
Two months later, on August 19, 2011, after the parties had been working on the Bridge Project for nearly three years, SAP unilaterally terminated the project and stopped supporting, selling, or marketing Teradata Foundation. Just days later in September 2011, SAP announced HANA for SAP BW, which combined front-end software with the back-end database engine (HANA) for the purpose of creating an EDAW solution—the same thing Teradata Foundation was intended to achieve.
Unbeknownst to Teradata at the time, SAP stole Teradata’s trade secrets related to optimizing data storage and retrieval (including query execution) in an MPP environment, without authority incorporated them into HANA, and otherwise used them to aid development of HANA, which has become SAP’s flagship database product. Unlike Teradata, which has spent four decades developing its EDAW technologies, SAP managed an initial release of its competing HANA product after spending mere months in development. It has become clear to Teradata that SAP was able to go to market so quickly only because SAP entered into an agreement with Teradata under the false pretense of integrating the two companies’ technologies, stole key Teradata trade secrets, and then incorporated them into and used them to develop HANA. – https://assets.teradata.com/News/2018/2018-06-19-Complaint.pdf
Whatever IP theft did occur, Vishal Sikka would know exactly what it was, as he was leading the team. In fact, Teradata specifically names Vishal Sikka as one of the primary parties that helped SAP steal IP from Teradata.
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.
It 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 Economic Times of India
Brightwork’s Prediction on the Teradata Lawsuit
We predict that Teradata will either win its lawsuit against SAP or interfere with that outcome before it happens. This would include
- Teradata being acquired (we proposed this could happen by SAP in the article Will SAP Acquire Teradata to Extinguish the Lawsuit?)
- A normal settlement.
The star witness for Teradata, former SAP employee Thomas Waldbaum has requested US Federal Witness Protection. As we covered in the article, SAP is Accused of Witness Tampering in Teradata Lawsuit. This is the most shocking legal filing we have ever read and indicated that either Thomas Waldbaum is completely insane, or SAP did what Thomas Waldbaum said they did. We find it unlikely that it is the former.
Generalized IP Theft?
However, what has been little discussed is that other database vendors have similar claims against SAP. 1/2 of the Teradata lawsuit deals with anti-competitive behavior, which SAP treated all database partners to while pushing their partners out of accounts using false claims around HANA. SAP has a multi-decade partnership with Oracle and IBM and Microsoft, and other database vendors, and they certify their databases for use with SAP applications. The relationships were very open and amiable, as all parties were making money from the arrangement. However, these partnerships allowed SAP to learn a great deal about these databases. These vendors naturally exposed their IP to SAP as part of the certification process.
We covered in the articles Did SAP Reinvent the Wheel with HANA? How to Understand Fake Innovation in SAP HANA, SAP had taken IP from multiple database vendors.
Note that we wrote these articles before the Teradata lawsuit, and we had no idea Teradata would file their lawsuit.
Oracle and TomorrowNow
Oracle has already sued SAP. This was the TomorrowNow case where SAP had to admit to IP theft.
States District Court for the Northern District of California case in which Oracle sued SAP, alleging that SAP had engaged in copyright infringement by downloading thousands of copyrighted documents and programs from Oracle’s Customer Connection website. SAP admitted that its subsidiary TomorrowNow had infringed Oracle’s copyrights and a jury awarded Oracle record-high damages in the amount of $1.3 billion. Judge Phyllis Hamilton later vacated the jury’s verdict, which was based on the calculation of a hypothetical license, and granted SAP’s motion for a new trial dependent on Oracle rejecting a remittitur of $272 million. In November 2014, an appeals court ruled for $356.7 million in damages, a decision which was accepted by both parties. – Wikipedia
Therefore, although they are a partner with SAP, Oracle has already sued SAP and won, and they already beat them specifically in a case of IP infringement.
The Story of HANA’s Development: The Impossible Dream
HANA was developed in a very haphazard manner. It began with Hasso Plattner setting up unrealistic design parameters, and then after Hasso Plattner could not get the development team to get HANA to work properly (Hasso is just an “ideas person” and quickly loses focus on things, and likes to hand projects off when real work begins), so Hasso flipped HANA to Vishal Sikka as a special project.
However, HANA’s claims would always be impossible to meet, as we cover in the article Articles that Exaggerated HANA’s Benefits. SAP was constantly redesigning HANA, including a large change to where many row-based tables were added to the database as we cover in the article How Accurate Was John Appleby on HANA SPS08?, even though HANA originally promised to be 100% columnar and as when they introduced HANA 2 which was a major re-architecting of HANA years after it had been released as we cover in the article How the SAP HANA 2 Story Was a Cover for the Real Story.
This meant that the HANA team was desperate to add capabilities to meet Hasso’s unrealistic goals and promises that he and SAP had made to the market. According to our research and according to Teradata, they took shortcuts that resulted in a violation of Teradata’s IP.
Vishal Sikka and SAP
Vishal Sikka left SAP very quickly back in 2014. It was noted at the time how abrupt the departure and the fact it was immediate. Vishal is thought to have had a good relationship with Hasso Plattner, but opinions differ regarding his general predisposition towards his previous employer. But of course, Oracle is paying him what appears to be a legal advisement consulting contract and naming him to the board.
These types of enticements are hard to pass up. Secondly, Vishal’s AI startup has received the coverage of his appointment to the board of Oracle and Larry Ellison claiming he is a “world expert” on AI, although he clearly is not.
Legal Support for an IP Theft Lawsuit
Much of the work for an Oracle lawsuit has already been done and is contained in Teradata’s legal filings with the Northern District of California.
Oracle’s IP attorneys have certainly extensively reviewed these documents, conferred with Oracle’s database team, specifically the team that works with SAP to certify SAP databases and see if any of Oracle’s IP was breached by SAP. Oracle has sued for far less, as is evidenced by its lawsuit against Google for violation of its Java IP, which of course, it did not own at the time.
Conclusion
Vishal Sikka has one thing that would make Oracle hire him at such a precious consultant rate, and that is his knowledge of the HANA project, which he led. Vishal Sikka can tell Oracle essentially what SAP took, and Oracle can agree to hold SAP accountable, but not Vishal. Oracle, after all, would want to collect damages against SAP, not Vishal Sikka. It is in their interest to now protect Vishal and to only expose or bring legal claims in areas that inoculate Vishal from accusations. If Teradata had Vishal Sikka as a consultant or on their board of directors when they filed their lawsuit against SAP, Teradata would have conveniently left out the claims they made against him.
The story presented by Oracle that Vishal Sikka was added to the board is a cover story designed to deflect that Vishal Sikka is helping Oracle plan its lawsuit against SAP. Oracle can, of course, choose to file the lawsuit whenever it sees fit and can continue to review the ongoing information that is flowing from the legal filings with the Northern California District. For instance, from recent filings, Oracle would have determined that SAP is extremely concerned about the testimony from Thomas Waldbaum. There is no reason Oracle cannot hire Thomas Waldbaum as an expert witness after the Teradata lawsuit.
Oracle can then request the same documents (and more) that SAP has provided to the court and Teradata and that it is yet to provide (and Teradata has complained to the court that SAP has taken far too long to provide). With Vishal Sikka in their pocket and access to the Teradata lawsuit, Oracle is in an excellent position to file a lawsuit against SAP.
References
*https://www.techrseries.com/employee-engagement/oracle-names-vishal-sikka-to-the-board-of-directors/
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/teradata-claims-former-cto-vishal-sikka-was-aware-of-ip-theft-in-lawsuit-against-sap/articleshow/64679793.cms?from=mdr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corp._v._SAP_AG
https://www.businessinsider.com/sources-why-vishal-sikka-left-sap-2014-5
https://assets.teradata.com/News/2018/2018-06-19-Complaint.pdf