Silver Lining Dept.

We wrote last week about the ComputerWorld item discussing big corporations acquiring smaller companies.  Cesar Rojas with ANTs Software commented on that item, pointing out that smaller companies aren't always looking to get bought out.

I think there are exceptions to the rule when it comes to small tech companies. In this down economy there are real needed innovations that are very critical to significantly reduce IT costs. That empowers smaller companies to negotiate with the big guys because the technologies they develop can really jeopardize critical revenue streams of these firms while providing huge OPEX reductions for customers.

We thought this was an interesting perspective, and when we inquired with Mr. Rojas, we got a call back from Ken Ruotolo, ANTs' CFO, who explained a little more about why ANTs is sanguine about remaining independent.

For one thing, the company is publicly traded (OTC:ANTS), and has gone through several episodes of repurposing.  They sold their high-performance database line of business in 2005, and are now delivering a middleware solution for migrating databases to new platforms without having to modify applications.

Having some experience in data migration (we worked on the team at SynOptics that migrated from Oracle Financials to SAP R3 in 9 months, and led the team at Bay Networks that implemented a Scopus-based call center database on top of Informix in 11 weeks), we were particularly interested in this solution.  As Mr. Rojas continued in his comment:

We recently moved a 3,000 user call center app for Wyndham Hotels from Sybase to Oracle where the customer didn’t need to change a single line of application code. The whole migration lasted one week compared to the multi-month/multi-year application migration process that Wyhdham might have embarked without deploying our product.

Very cool stuff, indeed.  So why wouldn't ANTs want to be acquired by a giant like Oracle, say?  Because they have the potential to become a big player in their own right.  Mr. Rojas again:

I truly believe that smaller/innovative companies that can significantly reduce IT costs in this economy are the exception to the rule and we will be in the driver seat when negotiating alliances with big IT vendors.

As Mr. Ruotolo explained to me, ANTs Compatibility Server product enables a company to migrate large enterprise-wide databases from costly proprietary platforms such as Oracle or Sybase to an open source platform like MySQL, reducing cost of ownership to a fraction of current operating expense.

As data center managers increasingly try to squeeze more efficiencies from operations through consolidation of hardware and software solutions, ANTs Compatibility Server bids fair to be enormously disruptive.  By employing platform companies as channel partners, they have every reason to expect that the potential for growth to be substantial.