ANTs Software Buys Inventa Technologies; Sells ANTs Data Server
ANTs Software, a leader in compatible, high-performance SQL database management systems, announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Inventa Technologies, a provider of application and database managed services. ANTs has also signed an agreement to sell its high-performance ANTS data server to Four J’s Development Tools, a leader in development tools for business applications. The ANTS data server, which will be rebranded and sold by Four J’s under the name Genero db,is a high-performance, scalable, relational database for mission-critical applications already being used to manage 900 stores of a Fortune 100 U.S. retailer. The deals have been financed, in part, by a $7.5 million private placement of stock ANTs completed this spring.
“We are out of the high-performance database business,” Joe Kozak, president and CEO of ANTS, told 5 Minute Briefing in an exclusive interview. “We are getting a tremendous response from our customer base and the database vendor community to our compatibility server. Moving forward, ANTs is in an excellent position to focus its full resources on development, sales and deployment of the ANTs Compatibility Server.”
A full-featured, standards-compliant relational database management system, the ANTs Data Server, now the Genero db, is based on a breakthrough, high-performance SQL query execution engine that incorporates patented lock-free operations. The ANTs Data Server is compatible with applications written for Oracle, Oracle-TimesTen, Informix and SQL Server databases. “Genero db is the perfect complement to our strategy and leverages our existing strengths in application development,” said Jean-Georges Schwartz, CEO, Four J’s. “Now that we own the technology, we can better fit the development agenda to our needs. What excites me the most about this agreement is the opportunity to disrupt the market with a revolutionary enterprise-class architecture. Through its compatibility layer, we can migrate customers painlessly and its ability to slash the number of servers in a cluster will surely be well-received by a world increasingly keen to conserve energy.” As part of the multi-million dollar agreement, employees working on the ADS will join Four J’s and current ADS customers will receive support from Four J’s.
With the acquisition of Inventa, ANTs Software has added an experienced professional services team to complement the strong engineering team behind the ANTs Compatibility Server. Taken together, the company now offers customers and database vendors a market-leading application re-hosting product and a high-caliber team of consultants to deploy it. Under the terms of the agreement, ANTs Software will pay $3 million in cash, issue a $2 million convertible promissory note and issue 20 million shares of ANTs Software common stock to Inventa's shareholders. “We have doubled the size of the company and added a significant revenue stream,” Kozak said. But most importantly, he added, “We didn’t have the ability to implement our technology before. We were really a research and development shop.”
The ANTs Compatibility Server is software that allows application code – queries, stored procedures, and functions – from legacy databases to run natively and transparently against the new target database with minimal to no application rewriting and recompiling. Applications run natively on the ANTs Compatibility Server, which also connects natively to the target database. The application operates as if it were still communicating with the original database, while the new database operates as if it were communicating with a native application. For more information, go here.
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Ingres Makes OpenRoad Open Source; Increases Involvement with Open Source Community
Ingres, a provider of open source database management software and support services, announced an open source version of Ingres OpenROAD, the company’s platform for rapid application development. “What we have done in making the decision to take OpenRoad open source is listened to our partner community who are building applications using the OpenRoad technology,” Emma McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering at Ingres, told 5 Minute Briefing. “They really wanted to be provided with the ability to introduce new functionality into the OpenRoad environment and to do that, they needed the product to be open source.”
Ingres OpenROAD is a rapid application development and flexible deployment solution, known for its low maintenance cost, according to the vendor. With Ingres OpenROAD, developers can quickly build and deploy sophisticated high performance and high availability business applications on a variety of platforms, accessing a broad range of data sources. OpenROAD is written in such a way that you can plug additional functionality to it, which partners have done in the past, noted McGrattan. “But they wanted more direct access to the source code, to increase their level of engagement at the code level with the product.”
Specifically, Ingres has open sourced the 4GL source for the OpenROAD Integrated Development Envionment (IDE) component of the Ingres OpenROAD product. Ingres now utilizes the GPL open source license for the project, which is live on the Ingres community Web site. Users can have more influence on product direction, and contributions from users can be integrated into the base product with enterprise support offered from Ingres. Ingres has also created community tools to aid in the support of the open sourcing initiative, including LXR for source code viewing, bug tool for tracking and entering bugs, a community wiki for sharing information and to gather ideas on new projects. Ingres is already working with partners and customers to gain contributions to the open sourcing of Ingres OpenROAD.
Separately, Ingres also announced that it is intensifying its involvement in the open source community to increase validation and adoption of open source. Among the company’s open source initiatives are the Ingres Janitors Project, Open Source Boot Camp, and the Ingres Open Source University Program. One of the key areas of focus for Ingres is to reach students, said McGrattan. In many cases, she noted, graduates are coming out of college without a true appreciation and understanding of open source. For more on Ingres, go here. For the Ingres community Web site, go here.
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SugarCRM Introduces Sugar Data Center Edition for Partners and Enterprises
SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, has introduced Sugar Data Center Edition (DCE), a new product line for SugarCRM partners and enterprise customers. Sugar Data Center Edition is a complete set of systems management, provisioning and monitoring tools to enable service providers and large organizations to deploy and manage multiple instances of SugarCRM from a centralized management console.
Sugar DCE will be delivered in two versions - one for partners and one for customers. Sugar DCE for Partners allows SugarCRM resellers and hosting providers to deliver SugarCRM in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to their customer base. Sugar DCE for Enterprises allows large companies to manage multiple versions of SugarCRM within their company from a single location. The new product line is intended to address two major needs in the enterprise software arena. With the growth of software-as-a-service, partners want more control over the management of CRM instances in order to serve their customers, and also enterprises need the ability to create and manage multiple CRM instances to serve the differing needs of business units.
Describing SugarDCE as essentially “SaaS in a box,” Martin Schneider, director of product marketing, SugarCRM, told 5 Minute Briefing, “We are basically giving systems management tools to our partners and our larger enterprises so they can basically create, deploy, manage, monitor and report on” multiple instances from a single console.
Sugar Data Center Edition for Partners allows SugarCRM resellers, hosting providers and OEM partners to create and administer multiple custom versions of SugarCRM from a single location. These capabilities lower the cost of managing and supporting Sugar On-Demand and allow partners to offer greater customization of SugarCRM based on industry and geographic demands.
For large companies serving multiple business divisions, Sugar Data Center Edition for Enterprises allows IT organizations to create and manage multiple instances of SugarCRM from a single console, allowing companies to implement CRM solutions more quickly and meet the specific feature requirements of individual business units.
“It allows our partners as well as our large enterprises in a way to be SaaS providers in their own right,” said Schneider. With the introduction of Sugar DCE, he observed, “we are taking a bit of a departure from the norm here for us and getting into a new area, which is basically systems management and monitoring tools - obviously dedicated to the Sugar stack, course.”
Sugar Data Center Edition is currently in beta testing and will be generally available this summer and can be used to support Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise editions. To learn more about this new functionality, go here. To sign-up for a free trial of Sugar Professional 5.0, go here.
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Protegrity and Teradata Announce Unmatched Data Encryption Performance
Protegrity, a provider of data security management solutions, and Teradata, a global leader in enterprise data warehousing, have announced new cryptography performance of over 6 million decryptions and over 9 million encryptions per second, enabling customers to maximize data protection while minimizing impact on business operations. The general thought is that encryption hurts performance, Todd Bottger, director of product management at Protegrity, told 5 Minute Briefing. This announcement demonstrates that “you can protect sensitive data with strong encryption and still have a high level of performance,” he said.
The Protegrity Defiance DPS uses Teradata User Defined Functions (UDFs) to embed encryption/decryption functionality in the database. Teradata's high performance UDF implementation and parallel architecture provides highly efficient execution, and then scales that performance linearly as the system grows in size. The test included the Defiance Data Protection System utilizing industry standard strong Advanced Encryption Standard and Teradata 12 on a six-node (12 Intel Xeon processors) Teradata 5550 Platform.
In June 2005, the Protegrity and Teradata announced a global partnership to deliver database security for Teradata customers. “This is the first time that we had numbers to support our performance,” Bottger said. “This is an important announcement because it answers the question about how protecting data will impact performance.” To learn more, visit here.
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JNBridge Unveils JNBridgePro 4.0
JNBridge, a provider of Java and .NET interoperability tools, has announced the latest release of its core product, JNBridgePro. The new version is designed for developers building cross-platform applications. JNBridgePro 4.0 is integrated with the primary Java and .NET IDEs: Eclipse and Visual Studio. JNBridge 4.0 allows developers to code against the opposite platform without leaving their native development environment.
JNBridgePro 4.0 connects Java and .NET-based components and applications together with bridging tools and adapters that remove the complexities of cross-platform interoperability. JNBridgePro provides fast access to anything Java from anything .NET and anything .NET from anything Java, including EJBs, J2SE, J2EE, AWT, SWT, Swing, .NET APIs, ASP.NET, WinForms, or SharePoint Server. Developers can explore Java or .NET classes to quickly select which classes to integrate, and then JNBridgePro builds proxies that are callable from the other side.
The idea is that if a customer has some best-of-breed Java application or component that they have invested money or time in, and then they want to do development in .NET and they don't want to throw away their existing Java, they can use JNBridgePro “to leverage their old investment and actually use that Java code as if it were .NET code,” Wayne Citrin, CTO of JNBridge, explained to 5 Minute Briefing. “We take pride in the fact that the product is very easy to use. They can get the integration very quickly - in a matter of hours,” Citrin said, rather than the days or weeks an alternative approach might take. “The product is a bridging solution in the sense that the Java still runs in a Java environment and the .NET still runs in the .NET environment, and we manage the communications between the two.”
With JNBridgePro’s new plug-ins, developers now can explore and expose Java classes from within Visual Studio and explore .NET classes from within Eclipse. Developers can remain in their native IDE while coding and building against the other platform. Visual Studio users do not have to know the underlying Java code they’re accessing and Eclipse users do not have to know the underlying .NET code they’re calling. JNBridgePro 4.0 also includes full 64-bit support and data compression of large messages and arrays for greater performance.
With the Eclipse and Visual Studio plug-ins in JNBridgePro 4.0, the proxy generation process becomes just another project in the build cycle, according to Citrin. ISVs as well as large enterprise customers doing in-house work “are probably the biggest customer sets that we have,” said Citrin, noting there is particular demand for the product in the financial services and insurance sectors. “There is a lot of investment in legacy Java - and a lot of the new work particularly on employees' desktops is done in .NET, he observed. “They want this very fast high-throughput interop, so we seem to have found a sweet spot there.” For more information on availability of JNBridgePro 4.0, go here.
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