A Montreal developer of data management software has put on a new face and is looking for more Canadian channel partners.
Sand Technology Inc., a small 20-year-old company whose software can read and analyze compressed software on the fly, is trumpeting new versions that are now closely integrated by adding the tags “Dynamic Nearline Architecture” (DNA) to their names.
Until now DNA Access for archiving and DNA Analytics for fast data analysis were separate products with different purposes, said Jerry Shattner, Sand’s executive vice-president. “But with the release of Access 12 months ago we learned from customers and analysts that it lends itself to an active data environment, and that’s the reason for the tight integration and rebranding.”
The products which run on Unix, Linux and Windows servers, are aimed at industries with high data requirements such as healthcare, government, finance, retail and global transportation. Typically they have to keep high volumes of data for regulatory reasons or who may need to do unscheduled data analysis from the compressed volumes Access generates.
DNA Access, Shattner said, can squeeze data by as much as 15 per cent of its original size, while Analytics allows queries without decompression, even from data warehouses.
Pricing is based on the amount of data handled: DNA Analytics sells for about US$150,000 per terabyte of data. DNA Access costs about $50,000 for 1 TB of input, less for larger volumes.
Sand is also using the renaming to promote the announcement in January that SAP AG has certified DNA Access as an integrated add-on for NetWeaver Business Intelligence 3.1. It’s a decision that Sand, which had revenues of only $6 million last year, is putting great hopes on.
SAP BI users are “going to be an extremely significant market for us,” said Shattner. There are an estimated 10,000 SAP BI customers around the world. “If we can capture even a small portion of that we will grow from being a small company to a very large one quite quickly.”
The company originally started out as a joint venture in Canada with Hitachi Data Systems to sell its systems. The Canadian partners acquired Analytics as a solution to sell along with the servers. But they discovered that HDS was a limiting channel for the product, so left to set up Sand in 2000. A year ago it added Analytics, now in version 4.2, which can pull data from spreadsheets to data warehouses without users needing the assistance of a data analyst.
Shattner said Sand has 60 customers, mainly in Europe.
Thanks to the SAP certification, Sand is now able to increase its channels. Until now it has been working with system integrators such as Accenture and some boutique data processing solution providers.
But it is now talking with system integrators around the world who could add its products to their offerings. Linda Arens, who is responsible for Sand partners, said it could add “maybe half a dozen” in Canada. Among the attributes it’s looking for are solution providers with experience in SAP applications and who have a track record with enterprise-sized companies.
Last month it signed Sigma Business Solutions of Toronto, which specializes in consulting on enterprise resource management applications including SAP archiving and data management. “We felt there was a good fit,” said Roland Bahadoor, one of Sigma’s managing partners, “and we can make this product go on the market.”
Sand’s software is particularly suited for clients with several terabytes of data, he said. Sigma has already spoken to a half-dozen clients about the products and is arranging demonstrations.
The software “will be a valuable asset because a lot of people have large data warehouses,” he said, “and in the next year or so you’ll see an explosion (in size) of them because they’ve been accumulating data for a few years and they’re getting to the point where they’re going to have to do something.”
