SigEx Ventures NanoData by Silvia Baldin

Why NanoData?

One megamerger after another married the promises of market leaders in different worlds, stiring the excitment and the promise of some day delivering global business solutions, movies and music to customers. Vivendi and AOL Time Warner represent symbolically the current economic models, both from the potential synergies and the ellusive capabilities of delivering such products and services. Two years ago, both AOL Time Warner and Vivendi each made multi-billion dollar deals and promised to leverage their media warehouses into interactive broadband services, transforming themselves into the new media communications companies. These models have transformed their owners, not into capable deliverers, but floundering suppliers.

The catch-22 facing our potential deliverers is the ability to provide real-time access to products measured in terabytes and in some cases approaching the "holly grail" petabyte, literally a mountain of data distributed throughout the enterprise and needed in some cases globally. The AOL Time Warner merger has recently been questioned regarding its viability and ability to generate revenue. The premise for the merger was based on the ability to deliver broadband digital services of Time Warner movies and media content, but the lack of a single delivery platform capable of warehousing, identifying and distributing secure data services has robbed the future of AOL Time Warner with posted losses of $54 billion of write-downs, reflecting the decline merger value as of the first quarter year 2002.

Vivendi megamerger with Seagram and Universal (a recent merger with Seagram) has had equally exciting intellectual property with music, movies and cable programs, but again, unable to release their products and services globally for the lack of a unified digital platform capable of maintaining reliable global broadband services. Vivendi recently has had to acknowledge their dilemma with second-guessing of the overall value and goodwill of their network by posting first quarter losses and write-downs of $15.3 billion.

Both business models have been unable to crack the problem of how to maintain high-bandwidth network services through a myriad of communications networks and have been grappling with their situation to deploy profitable economic models.

SigEx NanoData believes the problem is not the question of "what" they are doing, but "how" to do it. Clearly, the multi-billion dollar investment into 3G, the Internet and digital TV and computers as well as the hunger of users to receive interactive streaming services justifies, by definition, "what" the megamergers are attempting to do. But "how" ?


Presentation of the Team

Christopher M. Cantell (CEO), Frédéric Artru (Président & COO) and John A. Scarritt (Strategic Partner) are « serial » entrepreners which have, in many instances, showed their ability to develop and bring world-class advanced technologies to the market, create sustainable and profitable businesses and provide significant return on investment for their shareholders.

Chris brings more than 18 years of experience and ownership of diverse companies in technology licensing, recruiting and international corporate structuring with expertise in areas ranging from software development, public relations and advertising, to finance on a global basis, including United States, Europe, Canada, and a five year stint in South America (Brazil). Chris has a proven track record developing new business, researching and securing existing structures to solve complex problems, and recruiting best practices to deliver superior results. He works closely with industry leaders to develop deep relationships, usually measured in years, to create sustainable structures.

Frédéric brings over 10 years of experience in communication protocols and architectures as well as advanced voice over IP industry expertise. Frédéric is co-author of the Versit CTI Encyclopedia, a 3,000 page, 6 volume industry specification for telecommunication systems. More recently, Frédéric founded Odisei, the worlds first developer of hosted-iPBX technology, which was acquired in 1999 by Netergy Networks. With a strong technical background in communications and development, Frédéric also has global experience in successfully recruiting and managing international engineering teams in different locations, using the most advanced development practices such as extreme programming (XP).

John brings enhanced communications to the world of mainstream data warehousing. For the past 4 years John has been installing SAP BW data warehouses for many of the worlds largest companies providing design, development and analysis consulting across a wide spectrum of industries and corporate models. John approaches data warehousing from the standpoint of efficient design and re-usability. His systems background has exposed him to many varieties of corporate cultures and how they deal with their data. John has been directly involved with SAP BW projects first in the Middle East with the world’s largest oil company, Aramco and more recently throughout the United States with companies like Becton-Dickenson, Canada Poste, Bata Shoes, Solvay, WestVaCo and the University of Tennessee.

A detailed biography is available here.

Frédéric Artru co-founded SigEx, Inc. with partner, Christopher M. Cantell. Frédéric brings over 10 years of experience in communication protocols and architectures, team management and product delivery as well as advanced voice over IP industry expertise.

The founders recruit the top engineering, business and communications people and train them to the most advanced development, finance, business and strategic communication. The team is also supported by a best-practice organization covering accounting, recruitment, legal, public relations and strategic communications.



Product and Market Positionning

SigEx NanoData Networks proudly presents its best-of-class TeraCube® Software Infrastructure (TeraCube®), as being a comprehensive software foundation to create, deliver and deploy business-aware terabyte data warehousing services. These services can be deployed as IP applications (meaning internal to the enterprise from a logical standpoint) or as IP data warehouse features using a truly hosted model and targeting any type of clustered customer group.

SigEx NanoData has identified the “Internet Portal" and its relationship to the global economy’s largest data warehouse users as one of our primary market segments of influence. The major players in this market share a vision that we intend to extend beyond current capabilities. That vision is the free interchange of business intelligence between business partners. SigEx NanoData’s flexibility extends far beyond the IP mindset and into the world of wireless global data delivery. The market in this area can be defined by some of its key players Like Nokia and Siemens AG.


Theory of Business

Enhanced communications follow an economic logic called Cantell’s Law: « time value reaches zero ».

In today’s economic models, which is billing for bandwidth based on time and distance, increasing utilization of the resources creates very little value. The economic model for enhanced communications, services can finally absorb available resources resulting in a dramatic elevation of the entire demand curve thanks to a highly parallel, real-time, multi-transport, multi-protocol and multi-channel open pipe architecture. Value is therefore associated to the experience of the user (for instance, massive distribution of movies on demand or instant access to corporate data warehouse information). The result is a strong creation of value, which justifies the pricing of the service.

Though it was well known that high bandwidth services (such as global corporate access to data warehouses) were necessary to create value, there has never been an actual economic theory behind this. Also, the industry has attempted to compress data and reduce the bandwidth usage rather than utilize more bandwidth to deliver more valuable services. Cantell’s Law, which is simplified in the above description, is the cornerstone of the new Enhanced Communications industry’s economic models. It allows us to understand the real technical challenges to address in order to create value.

by Silvia_SigExFoundry