Reno firm wins international software prize

A small Reno company won one of the world's biggest honors for software development last month.

Its chief executive officer, however, isn't taking long to bask in the spotlight. Instead, Nory Nakhaee is moving as quickly as he can to attract fresh capital, build a management team and add marketing horsepower to Sundance DSP Inc.

The company took first place in the software design competition in the annual Institute of Engineering and Technology Innovation Awards.

The institute headquartered in Great Britain includes more than 150,000 members in 127 nations, and the Reno company squared off against giants such as British Aerospace in the competition's final round.

It's unlikely that Sundance DSP's winning entry will become a household name. Its software dubbed PARS

short for "Parallel Application from Rapid Simulation" allows programmers to easily write code after they create software models with Simulink.

That's a very big deal for software engineers who are developing highly complex programs such as next-generation communications and radar systems for the U.S. military. In fact, it was the work of Sundance

DSP on a contract for the U.S. Army that led to development of the award-winning PARS

system.

The potential market, Nakhaee says, may run into the billions of dollars but he worries that bigger, better-capitalized companies may poach the turf of Sundance DSP before it can fully capitalize on its award-winning work.

"This award is a big marketing opportunity," he says. "Now it is not just us who says, 'This is good.' This has been vetted by very serious people."

The award is so big, and Sundance DSP was such an unlikely finalist, that Nakhaee didn't bother to attend the awards announcement ceremony in London. Instead, he sent a software engineer from the company's office in Scotland to attend what they figured to be the announcement of a disappointment.

Sundance DSP amounts to only 10 employees scattered in locations around the world who have developed processors for digital signal processors and field-programmable gate arrays that can be configured by a computer user or designer for specialized applications.

Manufacturing of Sundance DSP products is handled by a contractor in Plano, Texas.

The company was founded nine years ago by Nakhaee, a Scottish native who'd been wooed to northern

Nevada by a previous job.

Nakhaee and his wife, Leila, who oversees Sundance DSP's marketing efforts, work from a home office in southwest Reno.

That sort of bare-bones operation can't continue, Nakhaee says.

"We have planted the seed, but the company needs real managers," he says. "We cannot be too complacent.

There are competitors with a lot of resources and a lot of money.

We are a little company."

Nakhaee, who is happiest when he's writing code rather than overseeing a business, believes one possibility is the sale of a substantial equity interest in the company allowing him to pursue his passions even while he owns a smaller piece of a larger enterprise.

Along with the credibility that comes

with the recent international award, Sundance DSP also holds another attraction to potential investors black ink on its income statement.

"We are profitable," said Nakhaee. "Not by much, but we are profitable."