Thirteen year shareholder here. If I remember correctly, ANTS (fka CHOPP Computer) was originally a parallel processing technology for a super computer to be built for Columbia University. When the market for supercomputers crashed, so did the contract with Columbia. The technology was pigeon holed for a number of years until Don Hutton brought it out of the mothballs and applied the technology in a database. The name of the company was then changed to ANTS which stood for asynchronos non-preemptive technology. Their claim was that the ANTS database could process data a thousand times faster than any other database. That claim was validated in testing by independent third party companies. The problem was that the company did not raise enough funding to hire enough programmers to develop the product with all of the bells and whistles needed to make it commercially attractive as a plug and play product. The database worked fine and as advertised (IMO) in simple applications but was lacking the necessary bells and whistles when applied to more complex ones. The other problem was that they found it difficult to convince prospects to switch mission-critical databases from well-known and reputable providers to a bulletin board company with perpetual cash flow issues that might not be around for long. They finally realized that in their efforts to process data going to other databases in the ANTS database, they had actually developed the holy grail technology (my own words) of being able to translate data meant for one database into a format that could be processed by a entirely different database with very little modification. The potential market is huge obviously, with the possibilities of companies consolidating numerous databases to one or two competing providers. The kicker for me was the validation by Don Haderle and Curt Cotner, both IBM fellows and the father of the DB2 and CTO of IBM Databases, respectively. Also the unveiling of the technology at IBM's global conference and runner-up finish for the Chief Technology Officer's (CTO) award at the conference. Go listen to Curt's webcast about the DB2 SQL skin on the IBM website if you haven't already. I personally met and spoke to both of them when they attended the ANTS shareholder meeting at the DoubleTree hotel in San Francisco (great chocolate chip cookies) to participate in a webcast immediately following the meeting. Also met the new CFO who helped the company go down the tubes IMO. Can't remember his name offhand right now. Selective memory I guess. Again the company ran into the same problem with funding. The technology was proven but they didn't have the cash or knowledge to develop it to a commercially acceptable plug and play level. Frank Kautzmann seems to be the guy who can finally commercialize this proven disruptive technology. He's doing all the right things so far.
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