Sybase Reports Strong Quarter, Shares Database Roadmap

Company saw a 31% jump in enterprise database license revenue in the past year, plans to add time stamping and in-memory features to its IQ and ASE databases.

Sybase had a jolly earnings call this morning in which it announced 31% year-over-year growth in enterprise database license revenue and a quarterly cash flow from operations of $97.4 million. CEO John Chen revealed that the company signed 20 new customers, all Tier 1 financial institutions, for its RAP - The Trading Edition market analytics platform in the past year. He also claimed that because the IQ database runs on Linux and is hardware-agnostic, it's typically 10% to 20% of the cost of competitors such as Teradata, Vertica and Kx.

Afterward, we spoke with Raj Nathan, Sybase's chief marketing officer, about his product roadmap for the Sybase technology Wall Street firms use; namely, RAP and the ASE and IQ databases. Two major upgrades are planned for the databases this year. One is the ability to time-stamp real time and historical market data, which tends to be a challenge when data comes in from different sources. Sybase will provide user-defined functions to allow customers to develop their own time-stamp functions.

The second is the integration of in-memory components into the database products. Customers will be able to move certain often-used or often-in-contention tables or portions of tables into memory and execute queries there. This should enable much faster response times, Nathan said.