Sybase
Analysis of Sybase and its various product lines, such as Sybase IQ. Related subjects include:
- Data warehousing
- Columnar database management systems
- (in Text Technologies) Sybase’s Answers Anywhere language-response technology
- (in Software Memories) Historical notes about Sybase
Columnar DBMS vendor customer metrics
Last April, I asked some columnar DBMS vendors to share customer metrics. They answered, but it took until now to iron out a couple of details. Overall, the answers are pretty impressive. Read more
Attensity update
I talked with Michelle de Haaff and Ian Hersey of Attensity back in February. We covered a lot of ground, so let’s start with a very high-level view.
- Two years ago, Attensity merged with two other companies in somewhat related businesses, thus expanding 4X or so in size.
- Due to the merger, Attensity now has two core lines of business:
- Text analytics.
- Driving actions, such as call center or social media response, based on text analytics.
- The combined Attensity is part American, part German.
- Attensity’s German part compels it to do some public financial reporting. Attensity will do $50-60 million in 2011 revenue.
- Attensity crunches text in 17 languages. English is preeminent. #2 is — you guessed it! — German.
- A big part of Attensity’s business (or at least of its value proposition) is analyzing the text in social media. Attensity boasts coverage of 75 million social media sources, such as blogs, forums, or review sites.
The four most interesting technical points were probably:
- Attensity has changed how it does exhaustive extraction. I’m having some trouble writing that part up, so for now I’ll just refer you to Attensity’s own description of the new way of doing things.
- Attensity has development work underway meant to address some of the problems in text analytics/other analytics integration. I don’t feel I got enough detail to want to talk about that yet.
- Attensity runs its own data centers, with approximately 60 Hadoop/HBase nodes and 30 nodes of Apache Solr (open source text search). More on that below.
- Attensity now OEMs Vertica. More on that below too.
Some more specific notes include: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Cloud computing, Hadoop, HBase, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Software as a Service (SaaS), Sybase, Vertica Systems | 6 Comments |
ANTs Software updates
I drafted the partial post quoted below some months ago, but never finished it, as my general posting hiatus hit. Anyhow, I just thought of ANTs again, due to a LinkedIn request from an exec, and it came back to mind. Subsequent news includes that the product had to be temporarily pulled from the market (what a shock), there was $200,000 of IBM revenue through the end of 2010 (by ANTs’ standards, that’s a lot), and at some point three Sybase-to-IBM product sales actually got closed.
ANTs Software recently came (back) to my attention when, ego-surfing, I saw they had made up some falsehoods about me and posted same in their blog. So I posted about ANTs Software. Now that the ANTs Software blog is on my radar, I see there’s another post from CEO Joe Kozak stating his case that ANTs Software is a good investment. I also notice that there’s an active S-1 to sell ANTs Software stock, dated two weeks before the blog post. Frankly, it surprises me that it’s legal to recommend your own stock that emphatically while you’re in registration — but hey, I tend to be on the side of favoring more communication over less.
According to the ANTs Software 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, ANTs Software has >$2 million in negative working capital — which this offering apparently won’t change (it’s for a shareholder to sell stock, not for ANTs to raise more money for itself).
Actually, ANTs did manage to get its working capital positive again. The key paragraph from the 10-K linked above, emphasis mine, is
The consolidated financial statements contemplate continuation of the Company as a going concern. However, the Company has had minimal revenues since inception, suffered recurring losses from operations, has generated negative cash flows from operations and has an accumulated deficit of $156.97 million as of December 31, 2010 that raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. The Company also had significant near-term liquidity needs as of December 31, 2010, including $0.25 million currently due on a line of credit and $2.00 million in notes payable due January 31, 2011. Subsequent to December 31, 2010, the Company received proceeds from a $3.00 million subscription receivable (less $0.39 million in fees, including $0.24 million in dispute) for the sale of 5.18 million shares of common stock pursuant to the BRG Agreement, $0.06 million in proceeds from the exercise of warrants covering 0.13 million shares of common stock and gross proceeds of $0.75 million from the Note and Warrant Purchase Agreements. The outstanding balance on the line of credit was subsequently repaid and the notes payable were subsequently deferred until January 31, 2013. The Company’s ability to continue as a going concern is dependent upon management’s ability to generate profitable operations in the future and obtain the necessary financing to meet obligations and repay liabilities arising from normal business operations when they come due. The Company anticipates generating profitable operations from marketing and sales of ACS and the growth of our Professional Services offerings for ACS implementations. If the Company does not generate profitable operations or obtain the necessary financing, the Company may not have enough operating funds to continue to operate as a going concern. Securing additional sources of financing to enable the Company to continue the development and commercialization of proprietary technologies will be difficult and there is no assurance of our ability to secure such financing. A failure to generate profitable operations or obtain additional financing could prevent the Company from making expenditures that are needed to pay current obligations, allow the hiring of additional development personnel and continue development of its software and technologies. The Company continues actively seeking additional capital through private placements of equity and debt.
Bottom line: $157 million in losses have produced 3 sales (with more presumably coming) of a product that isn’t that important in the first place (it just helps you move from a perfectly decent DBMS to one you might like better while saving on migration costs). That makes almost any other failure in software industry history look like a rousing success by comparison.
| Categories: ANTs Software, IBM and DB2, Sybase | 6 Comments |
Updating our vendor client disclosures
Edit: This disclosure has been superseded by a March, 2012 version.
From time to time, I disclose our vendor client lists. Another iteration is below. To be clear:
- This is a list of Monash Advantage members.
- All our vendor clients are Monash Advantage members, unless …
- … we work with them primarily in their capacity as technology users. (A large fraction of our user clients happen to be SaaS vendors.)
- We do not usually disclose our user clients.
- We do not usually disclose our venture capital clients, nor those who invest in publicly-traded securities.
- Included in the list below are two expired Monash Advantage members who haven’t said they will renew, as mentioned in my recent post on analyst bias. (You can probably imagine a couple of reasons for that obfuscation.)
With that said, our vendor client disclosures at this time are:
- Aster Data
- Cloudera
- CodeFutures/dbShards
- Couchbase
- EMC/Greenplum
- Endeca
- IBM/Netezza
- Infobright
- Intel
- MarkLogic
- ParAccel
- QlikTech
- salesforce.com/database.com
- SAND Technology
- SAP/Sybase
- Schooner Information Technology
- Skytide
- Splunk
- Teradata
- Vertica
Comments on the 2011 Forrester Wave for Enterprise Data Warehouse Platforms
The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Data Warehouse Platforms, Q1 2011 is now out,* hot on the heels of the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Unfortunately, this particular Forrester Wave is riddled with inaccuracy. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, EMC, Exadata, Greenplum, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing, SAP AG, Sybase, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 7 Comments |
Comments on the Gartner 2010/2011 Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant
Edit: Comments on the February, 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems — and on the companies reviewed in it — are now up.
The Gartner 2010 Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant is out. I shall now comment, just as I did to varying degrees on the 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrants.
Note: Links to Gartner Magic Quadrants tend to be unstable. Please alert me if any problems arise; I’ll edit accordingly.
In my comments on the 2008 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant, I observed that Gartner’s “completeness of vision” scores were generally pretty reasonable, but their “ability to execute” rankings were somewhat bizarre; the same remains true this year. For example, Gartner ranks Ingres higher by that metric than Vertica, Aster Data, ParAccel, or Infobright. Yet each of those companies is growing nicely and delivering products that meet serious cutting-edge analytic DBMS needs, neither of which has been true of Ingres since about 1987. Read more
Mike Stonebraker on “real column stores”
Mike Stonebraker has a post up on Vertica’s blog trying to differentiate “real” from “pretend” column stores. (Edit: That post seems to have come back down, but as of 1/19 it can be found in Google Cache.) In essence, Mike argues that the One Right Way to design a column store is Vertica’s, a position that Daniel Abadi used to share but since has retreated from.
There are some good things about that post, and some not-so-good. The worst paragraph is probably
Several row-store vendors (including Oracle, Greenplum and Aster Data) now claim to be selling a column store. Obviously, this would require a complete rewrite of a DBMS to move from Figure 1 to Figure 2. Hence, none of the “pretenders” have actually done this. Instead all have implemented some aspects of column stores, and then claim to be the real thing. This blog defines what the “real enchilada” looks like, and how to tell it from the pretenders.
which I question on two levels. Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Columnar database management, Database compression, Michael Stonebraker, Sybase, Theory and architecture, Vertica Systems | 24 Comments |
Links and observations
I’m back from a trip to the SF Bay area, with a lot of writing ahead of me. I’ll dive in with some quick comments here, then write at greater length about some of these points when I can. From my trip: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Calpont, Cassandra, Couchbase, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, Exadata, Facebook, Greenplum, HP and Neoview, Kickfire, NoSQL, OLTP, ParAccel, Sybase, XtremeData | 1 Comment |
ANTs Software CEO insults Sybase, claims migration success
Jeff Pryslak of Sybase put up a post insulting ANTs Software and the general idea of ANTs-aided Sybase-to-DB2 migration. CEO Joe Kozak of ANTs hit back with a rambling diatribe, which came to my attention because he mentioned my name in it, making some rather fanciful remarks about the “long” relationship I used to have with ANTs Software. (I do recall at least one briefing, plus some attempts from them to buy my services under the condition that I agree to a ridiculous NDA, which I refused to sign.)
This piqued my interest, so — recalling that ANTs is a public company — I decided to take a look at just how successful their software products business is. Well, for the quarter ended March 31, 2010, ANTs’ 10-Q filing says (emphasis mine): Read more
| Categories: ANTs Software, Emulation, transparency, portability, IBM and DB2, Sybase | 9 Comments |
Sybase SQL Anywhere
After Powersoft acquired Watcom and its famed Fortran compiler, marketing VP Tom Herring told me that the hidden jewel of the acquisition might well be a little DBMS, Watcom SQL. To put it mildly, Tom was right. Watcom SQL became SQL Anywhere; Powersoft was acquired by Sybase; Powersoft’s and Sybase’s main products both fell on hard times; Sybase built a whole mobile technology division around SQL Anywhere; and the whole thing just got sold for billions of dollars to SAP. Chris Kleisath recently briefed me on SQL Anywhere Version 12 (released to manufacturing this month), which seemed like a fine opportunity to catch up on prior developments as well.
The first two things to understand about SQL Anywhere is that there actually are three products:
- Sybase SQL Anywhere, a mid-range relational DBMS.
- Sybase UltraLite, a DBMS for mobile devices.
- Sybase MobiLink, a replication/sync tool.
and also that there are three main deployment/use cases:
- Generic desktop or server computers. This was the original market for SQL Anywhere.
- Laptop/handheld computers. This was the original growth market for SQL Anywhere. In particular, Siebel Systems’ first growth spurt was selling sales force automation software on laptop computers with SQL Anywhere underneath.
- Specialized devices. Earlier this decade, Sybase thought SQL Anywhere’s big growth market was on specialized devices. (I recall a video featuring some kind of automated pill dispensing machine for hospitals.)
| Categories: Mid-range, Progress, Apama, and DataDirect, Specific users, Sybase | Leave a Comment |