Reno company's software tool featured as 'disruptive'

Reno tech innovator Nory Nakhaee of Sundance Digital Signal Processing Inc. has rolled out a product the company calls the first tool to automate the design of software.

How a big deal is it? The product was selected for demonstration among other potentially disruptive technologies at a show in Silicon Valley a couple of weeks ago.

Initially developed at the request of the U.S. Navy less than two years ago, the system's widespread applicability became immediately apparent, Nakhaee says.

Sundance retained the intellectual property rights and went on to develop a commercial product.

The market potential, says Nakhaee, is vast any company writing applications that require development of software and firmware (the step between software and hardware). Among them are companies developing automotive, sonar, radar and military technology.

"We don't find our customers; they find us," he says.

Sundance employs four locally, including Marketing Manager Leila Nakhaee. Staff engineers are based in Concord, N.H., and in Scotland, where Nakhaee cut his technological teeth with the British defense establishment.

The company already sells a series of libraries, designed by mathematicians, that provide information to ease software development. The information, offered on CD, gets pulled into the code-writing process in a variety of industries. The libraries sell from $5,500 to $10,000 each.

Sundance manufactures in Irvine, Calif., and Plano, Texas. Nakhaee initially tried northern Nevada manufacturing, but says he was forced to go out of state because of poor quality.

The firm's latest product, dubbed "PARS," is a software tool that allows developers to construct applications without writing code.

The application operates in Simulink, a programming model tool. Essentially, a programmer tells PARS what applications are already in the system, and PARS generates software.

"PARS allows one to make use of underlying parallel hardware," says Nakhaee, "with no need to learn the development tools, and the hardware."

Sundance's PARS product carries a $20,000 licensing fee. A site license, good for five or more users, sells for $100,000.

Site license clients potentially could include big enterprises such as General Motors, Oakridge National Labs or the U.S. Army and Navy, says Nakhaee.

Based on projected demand, he predicts Sundance will be a multi-million dollar company within five years. He's already fielding inquiries from China and Japan.

Despite the demonstration of PARS at the disruptive technologies conference, Nakhaee says, "This technology will not remove or displace technologies but build upon them. People can use existing technologies without the learning curve."

While Nakhaee plans to stay in Reno, he says, "The infrastructure to support high-tech industries is abysmal. Much more needs to be done. That must be by government; state-supported to provide high tech forums."

For instance, looking for a writer to pen a business plan, Nakhaee couldn't find the help he needed in Reno.

"In San Jose," he says, "it would be dead easy to do."