Why Tech Firms Are Battling Over Healthcare

There's more to the Infosys-Cognizant spat than meets the eye

- Shelley Singh

At one time, Texas was part of America's wild west, where a bullet separated the quick and the dead. These days, however, disputes in the largest state in the continental US are settled in court. Aside from that, however, the duels are just as vicious as they were in the 1800s.

A recent case epitomizes just how bitter things can get, with the two sides trading various charges, including theft, breach of contract, poaching, and moral turpitude, among other things.

These claims and counterclaims may seem like the fevered imaginings of a screenwriter scripting a Hollywood potboiler, but they are very real, and among the accusations IT services companies Cognizant and Infosys have flung against each other in a Texas court. While Infosys is an Indian company, the vast majority of US-based Cognizant's workforce is in India.

It all began last August, when Cognizant subsidiary TriZetto filed a lawsuit against Infosys in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, a federal court, accusing the Bengaluru-headquartered company of theft of trade secrets related to its healthcare insurance software. Cognizant had acquired the company about a decade earlier for $2.7 billion in its largest buyout ever. At the time Infosys was also reportedly eyeing TriZetto.

Infosys denied the allegations. Instead, on 9 January, it filed a counterclaim against the Nasdaq-listed Cognizant in the same court. In a rare instance of a company filing a case against a former executive, it accused Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar, who was the president of Infosys in his previous role, of misusing sensitive information and indulging in anti-competitive practices.

Infosys alleged that Kumar had deliberately delayed the rollout of Helix, its product rivalling Cognizant's healthcare solution, as he was in talks to join the Teaneck, New Jersey-headquartered company.