ANTs Software thinks there's a market for its high-performance databases, and the company is hoping resellers agree.
The Burlingame, Calif., company recently unveiled a partner initiative, the ANTs Software Alliance Program. The program aims to cultivate alliances with a few VARs in select vertical markets: financial services, telecommunications, health care, real-time logistics and security. The program also reaches out to OEMs and ISVs.
ANTs Software Inc. thinks the channel can boost its ANTs Data Server, which the company says is designed to provide high database throughput. The technology is geared toward applications involving real-time data capture and analysis and message queuing.
The ANTs Data Server supports Windows (2000, XP and Server 2003), several versions of Linux, and Solaris. The product is SQL- and ODBC/JDBC-compliant.
"The company is at a very early stage of going to market with ANTs Data Server," said Patrick Moore, vice president of channel business development at ANTs. He said resellers offer a way to introduce the technology to new accounts.
"Today's systems integrators and solutions providers are our targeted end-users' trusted advisers," Moore said, adding that those advisers play a key role in vetting new technology.
What's in it for the channel? ANTs offers the typical sales support, technical training and software margin.
But Moore said the greater benefit may be the ability to wrap high-margin professional services around the database product. He said resellers will be able to tune applications or develop new ones that take advantage of the database's performance.
The high-performance database also arms resellers with a TCO (total cost of ownership) story: Higher database performance means customers don't have to throw as much hardware at their transaction-intensive applications, Moore said.
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ANTs Data Server can operate as a standalone database or as a "helper database" that provides a turbo charge of sorts to a customer's primary database.
Embedding ANTs Data Server within an application is how Wireless Services Corp. plans to sell the database.
Wireless Services provides an SMS (Short Message Service) gateway software product. "We built a core product around Windows NT and SQL Server," said Curtis Miller, vice president of engineering at Wireless Services, which develops and operates value-added data products for carriers. "We found that there was a bottleneck in the system where we're doing high-volume queuing of messages to be picked up and transmitted."
The company shopped for a technology to solve this problem and eventually opted for ANTs Data Server. The Bellevue, Wash., company was able to take advantage of the product's performance, while making only minor modifications to its own software and remaining compatible with SQL Server, Miller said.
Meanwhile, Moore said he favors ties to database-savvy resellers over the creation of a direct sales force. "It makes much more sense to go to market in a partnership fashion," he said.
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