A jury in Dallas, Texas federal court has found Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) guilty of stealing DXC Technology’s trade secrets which is likely to land a $210 million penalty on the Indian software major. This comes as last week TCS announced a $125 million provision during Q3 after it lost a lawsuit and claim from Epic Systems.
The matter will now be decided by the Court, which has ordered further briefing from the parties. We plan to continue to litigate this ongoing case. We will have no further comment as the case remains pending,” said a company spokesperson.
In 2019, DXC predecessor Computer Sciences Corp filed a lawsuit against TCS claiming that it licensed its software to Transamerica subsidiary Money Services Inc. TCS had won a $2 billion deal from Transamerica in 2018. The lawsuit alleged that Tata rebadged 2,200 Transamerica employees in 2018 and used their access to CSC’s software to gain knowledge of its source code and other proprietary information to build a competing life insurance platform.
The lawsuit stated that TCS’ deal was for third-party administration and not for accessing the source code of its proprietary systems, which were later used to improve the TCS BaNCS software.
The jury found in a verdict, last week, that the Tata Group subsidiary misused confidential information about DXC’s Vantage-One and CyberLife software for managing life insurance and annuity policies to create a competing platform. It advised that TCS owed DXC $70 million for misappropriating its trade secrets and an additional $140 million because its misuse was “willful and malicious.”
Earlier in June, the US-based insurer Transamerica ended its 10-year deal with TCS, two years ahead of schedule. Sources in the know said that Transamerica was shifting to an insourced model as part of which it will take over the IT operations handled by TCS. This comes at a time when IT majors are struggling to grab mega deals in the market.
