Ants wins Navy bid over Oracle

Computerworld - The U.S. Navy has chosen an in-memory database from Ants Software Inc. to help run the back-end technology for its next-generation of stealth destroyers.

The Burlingame, Calif., company teamed up with IBM's information management group to win the bid from leading defense contractor Raytheon Co., which is building the mission-critical electronic and combat systems for the DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class of guided-missile destroyers.

Ants, whose Ants Data Server is claimed to be based on supercomputing technology and is optimized for online transaction processing (OLTP) environments that have many users, won the bid over Oracle Corp.'s in-memory database, TimesTen, according to Patrick Moore, vice president of the industrial sector and defense contracting for Ants.

Ants won the contract from Raytheon and the Navy last month because of its in-memory performance and its ability to run either embedded inside an application or outside, which better protects it from software crashes, Moore said.

Although Oracle protested the awarding of the contract to Ants, said Moore, Ants sealed the deal after bringing IBM on board. He said the contract heralds future partnerships with IBM, which has a number of databases in its lineup but lacks an in-memory one.

Moore said the total value of the deal will depend on how successful the Zumwalt prototype is and how many ships eventually are built.

Ants also recently won a deal from global food maker, Cadbury Schweppes plc, which migrated one Oracle database to Ants and is considering moving several more. The Ants database will also be used by Sears through an integration deal with another company.

The publicly-listed firm said in a September 8-K filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it is working to make its Data Server capable of hosting general-purpose, terabyte-sized databases.