Derek Rodner blasts ANTs Software
Derek Rodner got snarky, and blasted Ants Software. Highlights include (emphasis mine):
I have never seen more thinly veiled attempts to make themselves bigger than they are. … In 2005, they did almost a half million dollars in revenue. That’s right, I said a half million, or $467,000 to be exact. In 2006, it got worse at $288,000 in revenue and last year they did $360,000. Yet, they continue to drone on about their “consortium” which, from the outside simply looks like a beta program. Its no consortium. … And, they continue to mention a major deal with IBM that COULD be worth millions over time. You can read about it in every SEC filing. But, it has never materialized. … They announced a major Oracle partnership, but Oracle never acknowledges their existence. I think they simply signed up for the partner program at oracle and paid the $1500. … Sybase is paying them $1.4 million to do whatever they want with the entire product line from ANTs. … This means that Sybase can do whatever they want with the product, including reselling it without paying another dime to ANTs.
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hmm, he sounds a bit jaded and obviously he’s partial…but let’s rethink this a bit: don haderle on the ants board? does that lend anything to the value or credibility? okay, so if you’re down on that, how about the value of the ants.com domain name in the event of dissolution
…a few million? imho, ants collectively (beyond don) has ten times the tech cred of enterprisedb’s team, which is already quite impressive on its own, but that’s just me…
Dave,
Required Technologies, Inc. once had a clever architectural idea, plus an advisory board that featured Ted Codd, Mike Stonebraker, Eugene Wong, AND Chris Date. It was an utter disaster (check the Transrelational section here for some of the sad story), with some distressingly low-integrity behavior along the way.
ANTs also had some neat ideas — but they couldn’t make them work in the marketplace. And so far as I can tell, those neat ideas are relevant only to the DBMS efforts (abandoned), not the connectivity tools (what they’re still trying to make a business out of). And they have some funny ways of behaving too, although I’m not aware of anything as bad as what was going on in the transrelational example.
CAM