SAND DNA Overview

I spoke with Linda Arens, VP Alliances and Marketing for SAND. Here’s a summary of the discussion:

• SAND is based in Montreal, is listed on the OTC (SNDTF.OB). They have about 50-60 employees in the company.
• They stared in 1983 as a hardware company, but have remade themselves with proprietary storage software purchased from Lockheed Martin
• They have a number of products listed on their web site, but according to Linda they are all based on the same underlying foundation, hence the “DNA” moniker
• At the core is a column based, high compression database management system (DNA Analytics). Linda said they advertise 90% compression rates, but see mid-90s and above in real world scenarios. The database runs on a variety of operating systems (HP, Sun, Linux, Windows), and hardware platforms. This is not a full-stack appliance, but a special purpose database management system.
• SAND has pre-built integration with SAP BI, Oracle, IBM DB2, and Microsoft, and can operate behind or in conjunction with any of them.
• DNA Access component is intended to offload infrequently used data from the primary server, while still allowing seamless on-line access to the data. The big advantage of this is zero impact to existing user applications. This sounded similar to the way Dataupia operates, working behind the scenes to accelerate queries. DNA Access does allow direct queries, either using SQL or via a ODBC compliant access tool (she mentioned Business Objects, Microstrategy, and Cognos).
• SAND does have a small professional services group that focuses primarily on the setup and installation of their product. She said they leave the systems integration work to partners such as Accenture.

In their most recent financial results announcement, they touted a deal with P&G for the SAP BI product. Given the volumes in some SAP systems this capability would seem to be a competitive advantage. But I don’t know if SAND has anything else that differentiates them from the host of companies that are in this space now. Looking at their financial report, they listed $1.9M in revenue for the past quarter, which says they are still in their infancy in terms of actual sales. Given the amount of venture capital flowing into this sector, they will have a tough time getting traction.

This entry was posted on 10. July 2008 at 16:16 and is filed under Technical Focus, Vendors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.