Looking back to check on revenues for the ADS I came across this 8K from 2008. Worth a read to put things into perspective. The ADS revenues don't appear to be much, but....according to that one anonymous post, and backed up to some degree by Rik's Linkedin page several contracts were ready to be signed, but the sale put an end to those.
"In May, ANTs completed a series of strategic transactions which reshaped the company and positioned us as a leader in database consolidation. Gross income for 2008 is projected to be $8-10 million which is more than the cumulative gross income generated in the history of ANTs Software!
Gross Income Fiscal Year
$450,000 2005
$430,000 2006
$391,000 2007
$8,000,000 - 10,000,000 2008 (Projected)
Strategic Transactions
The first strategic transaction is the acquisition of Inventa Technologies. Inventa brings to ANTs a seasoned team of database professionals, a recurring revenue stream from multi year contracts, the ability to capture ANTs Compatibility Server (ACS) service revenue, and the means to rehost applications remotely as opposed to incurring significant expense with implementation teams working at each customer’s site.
Inventa’s customers include: Wachovia Banking, Aetna Insurance, Sybase, BMC Software and Honda Automotive. A full 99% of Inventa’s customers renew their multi year contracts. Both BMC and Sybase recently signed for additional services as well.
The second transaction was our largest license deal to-date, a $1.4 million license of the ANTs Data Server (ADS) to Sybase. This license provides Sybase access to the ADS high-performance technology, with four ADS engineers joining Sybase as part of the transaction."
The third transaction was the sale of ADS to Four Js Development Tools, our European partner. As part of the sale: the remaining eight members of the ADS team joined Four Js, ANTs retains 50% of the revenue generated from the Raytheon/US Navy contract for the next four years, and an unrestricted license to use key ADS technologies as we continue development of ACS.
There are several reasons for the sale of ADS:
The high performance DB market continues to decline as hardware performance increases.
TimesTen and Solid Technologies, two companies with high performance DB products were acquired by Oracle and IBM respectively. The purchase price in each case was well below ANTs’ current market cap. With those comparables in place it would have been difficult for ANTs to achieve a high market valuation based on an ADS product alone.
Expense reduction of $2-3 million per year
We can now focus all resources on the ANTs Compatibility Server.
Note that from time to time, we may choose to extend the exercise period during which former employees (such as those who joined Sybase or Four Js) may exercise their stock options. Those that aren’t extended must be exercised within three months according to our stock option plan. To the extent stock options are exercised and sold, this may affect the market activity of our stock in the short term.
The final strategic transaction was the sale of $7.5 million in common stock which was used to acquire Inventa and will be used for operating capital. Concurrent with the capital raise, we successfully negotiated an extension to January 2011 of almost all outstanding convertible debt."
Further down in the 8K it talks about the ACS.
"ACS can be used not only for database consolidation (think about moving from ten DB vendors to two) but, for the much larger initiative of data center and hardware server consolidation (think about moving from many hardware servers to few). Consolidating hardware-hungry databases can be done more economically, faster and with less risk with ACS. We believe we have first-mover advantage in this exciting market."
Now this is why(with my limited understanding) I believe an ACS/ADS combo could be so powerful. The ADS would allow less hardware because of it's efficiency and the ACS would make the transition painless. I realize this 8K seems to conflict itself regarding hardware, but one is talking about consolidation and the other, not necessarily so. But we need either several new versions of the ACS(remember, the original ACS is database specific and also, we don't fully understand why it failed in the marketplace) or Doc's creation, the new ACS aka the AAA. And right now I'm 50/50 as to which version is on the new website.
