Attunity (ATTUF),
a small OTC-traded company out of Massachusetts, is quietly building up
its base, expanding a 1000-customer foothold in real-time change data
capture (CDC) and data replication that has made it one of the few
remaining independent players standing. With Oracle's acquisition of GoldenGate
and SAP's announced plan to acquire Sybase, many firms are thinking about having an
alternative supplier. Attunity's competitors these days include iWay and
Progress DataDirect
- few firms can offer robust support for data sources like RMS,
VSAM, NonStop SQL, Enscribe and Adabas as well as common RDBMSs like
DB2, SQL Server and Oracle, and that leaves Attunity a relatively
wide-open opportunity. Attunity recently announced a 53% year-over-year
growth in license revenues; it's profitable (although GAAP
profitability, while in sight, has yet to be achieved) and beginning to
repay its debt. With less than $2M in revenues, it may well find itself
an acquisition target, to boot.

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In a seemingly perfect marriage of product and target market, database
pioneer Mike Stonebraker's new in-memory database company VoltDB
has emerged from stealth mode using the open source model, soon to
be open core. Its first release, GPL licensed Community
Edition will appeal to developers who need blindingly fast
transaction processing and are willing to do a lot of work themselves to
get there - the do it yourself (DIY) database. Who better than the Gluecon
community? Gluecon was the perfect place to do the formal roll out,
filled as it is with hands-on folks looking to work with NoSQL products
(like Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, Voldemort, etc.)

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It's not what you think - the hidden jewel for the near term may just be
SQL Anywhere. Read on. Disclosure: I worked at Sybase in the last
millennium, when it hit the wall at $1B the first time and bounced. Over
the next few years, Oracle dramatically outdistanced itself, in large
part, as it turned out, because of the massive opportunity presented by
SAP. Thousands of huge installs atop the Oracle DBMS, and not one with
Sybase. Why? Because of a technology disagreement. SAP wanted row-level
locking. Sybase's answer: "Let us tell you why you're wrong to want it."
Leaving aside the lesson to be learned from that one, let's talk about
how much the newly acquired Sybase database portfolio does for SAP. I'm
leaving the best for last, because all the chatter has been about ASE
and IQ, but read to the end.

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SAP announced today that it will acquire Sybase for
$65.00 per share, representing an enterprise value of approximately
$5.8 billion. The announcement says that "customers will be able to
better harness today's explosion of data and deliver information and
insight in real time to business consumers wherever they work so they
can make faster, more informed decisions." But the vision goes beyond
that: the combined companies will be able to deliver the ability to act
on those decisions, anywhere. The combination of SAP's substantial
share of its customers' transactional systems with Sybase's mobile
expertise in messaging and application development tools for mobile
devices affords extraordinary opportunities that are not lost on
management. Following the public press event, I chatted with Vishal
Sikka, SAP's CTO, and Dr. Raj Nathan, EVP and CMO of Sybase. We covered
some of the opportunities on the table and SAP's plans for its new
assets.

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