Database software vendor ANTs has formed a consortium of ten companies to develop processes and programs to migrate pilot Sybase applications to the Oracle database using the ANTs Compatibility Server.
The Compatibility Server is middleware that ANTs officials have said will help migrate applications from any of the major database offerings to another. The first product, scheduled to be announced late this year, will handle Sybase to Oracle migrations. Ultimately, the database vendor intends to produce different Compatibility Server products for each of the major databases, company officials said.
“Our intention is to be database agnostic,” said ANTs CEO Joseph Kozak, explaining that large companies have multiple databases and tens of thousands of applications sitting on top of them. “Look at the value proposition if you can take all of your applications and put them on two different databases and have those two major vendors compete against each other for your future business,” Kozak said.
The ten Fortune 500 or equivalent companies, which are not being publicly identified, represent a variety of business sectors including travel and financial services.
“They will provide us with an application that is currently in production running on the Sybase database,” Kozak said. “We will take that application and port it over to the Oracle database using our software.”
The companies will also provide someone from their tech staff who will check for quality assurance, he added.
“Weve already migrated over applications in a lab, now we wanted to make sure we got live applications from the street and from other major organizations and ensure we had all the nuances covered on a go-forward basis,” Kozak said.
The Compatibility Server allows applications to connect to the new target database through the server without having to be recompiled or rewritten. All the stored procedures and queries from the legacy database run natively without change on the Compatibility Server, which also connects natively with the new target database, ANTs officials said.
