Today it has 13 customers. Telecom giant Sprint Nextel Corp. is using an Ants database to power a mission-critical Short Message Service that processes 800 transactions per second and up to 15 million transactions per day. And an unnamed financial services customer plans to use Ants for a database with 90 million records and 1,200 users, according to Ants.

Grupo S&C, a large systems integrator in Mexico, has been using Ants Data Server since January to provide two hosted services. For one service, an enterprise content management system aimed at county governments, Grupo S&C migrated from an Oracle 9i database to the Ants software in a week. The Ants Data Server now processes 200,000 transactions a day.

'It runs quite better,' said Juan Ramos, vice president of technology at Grupo S&C. 'It's not less stable, and it's 50 percent cheaper than what we would have paid with Oracle.'

Grupo S&C also runs an outsourced payroll system that processes bimonthly paychecks for 30,000 employees.

'Everyone wants to get paid at the same time. We were getting about 300,000 transactions in two hours. And we were having locking problems,' Ramos said. Switching to Ants 'made it completely better.'