BENGALURU: Infosys filed a counterclaim towards Cognizant in a US court docket, alleging that its rival Cognizant and its CEO, Ravi Kumar, engaged in anticompetitive practices to stifle competitors and preserve dominance within the healthcare fee software program market. Infosys demanded a jury trial and sought triple compensation for damages incurred, together with acceptable authorized charges and bills.
This improvement got here six months after Cognizant filed a lawsuit towards Infosys, alleging that the latter stole proprietary info associated to its well being tech subsidiary, TriZetto. Cognizant acquired the healthcare tech agency TriZetto for $2.7 billion in 2014.
In 2019, Infosys determined to problem Cognizant’s dominance within the healthcare payer software program market. It developed a payer software program platform known as Infosys Helix, which caters to shoppers’ demand for cloud-based mostly merchandise. Infosys alleged that Cognizant carried out measures to hinder Infosys’s efforts in making a rival software program answer. Cognizant created entry limitations whereas attracting key govt sponsors away from the venture. These executives, Infosys stated, had been inspired to stiffle product development throughout their closing months with the agency.
The lawsuit alleged that the first govt sponsor of Infosys Helix was Kumar, who was its former president, and he championed Helix throughout his tenure on the agency. “But Kumar’s optimism and excitement for the Infosys Helix product suddenly changed in 2022. He began to pull back support for Infosys Helix, declining requests for needed resources, which delayed the completion of Infosys Helix by at least 18 months. In October 2022, Kumar resigned from Infosys, and shortly thereafter, was announced as CTS’s new CEO over Cognizant’s anticompetitive scheme to stall Infosys. Helix’s launch included the targeted recruitment of key senior executives responsible for Infosys Helix, including Kumar, Shveta Arora, and Ravi Kiran Kuchibhotla, and incentivizing them to delay and obstruct the development and marketing of Infosys Helix in the months leading up to their departures. conduct was designed to disarm Infosys’s new competitive threat to Cognizant’s dominance over the healthcare payer software market,” the doc accessed by TOI confirmed.
The counterclaim confirmed that Kumar, Arora, and Kuchibhotla continued to obtain confidential updates concerning the Infosys Helix marketing strategy and product pipeline by means of 2021. In the identical yr, Infosys signed a number of contracts for Infosys Helix, creating substantial worth for the corporate. The trio knew that one in all Infosys’s methods to “displace” and aggressively compete towards Cognizant was to leverage Infosys’s software program platforms, together with Infosys Helix, as a result of there was “CTS (Cognizant) fatigue in key large accounts.”
Despite being offered with these misplaced alternatives and associated challenges, Kumar continued to push again on requests for sources to help the event of Infosys Helix and as an alternative proposed that Infosys Helix “slow down,” suggesting Infosys mustn’t “make investments a lot engineering greenback on Infosys Helix,” the document showed. An email sent to Infosys on the matter did not elicit a response till the time of going to the press.
The anti-competitive restrictions included implementing most favored vendor or first right of refusal clauses in Cognizant’s payer agreements. These clauses effectively allowed Cognizant to block its software clients from assigning IT services work to competitors such as Infosys. Restrictions on product training reduced competitors’ ability to train staff for service delivery. Additionally, bans on developing supplementary products that could integrate with Cognizant’s software, along with unilateral non-solicitation terms, protected Cognizant’s employees from poaching while allowing Cognizant to weaken its rivals’ ability to compete.
When Toi reached out the Cognizant, the company said, “Cognizant is dedicated to upholding the best requirements of integrity in all enterprise operations and can take decisive motion to deal with any allegations that compromise aggressive standing. Cognizant encourages competitors, however opponents can not use Cognizant’s IP to compete unfairly, as Infosys’s software program merchandise are extensively used within the market for being finest-in-class and most most popular amongst. clients.”
