Skytide today announced that Sasol Technology, a global energy company based in South Africa, has selected the Skytide Analytical Platform to perform the complex analytics and reporting involved in managing its Intellectual Property (IP) entities. Skytide is a critical part of Sasol's move to revolutionize the way they analyze, protect and enforce their IP rights.

Since Sasol was established in 1950 by the South African government, it has developed world-leading technology for commercial production of synthetic fuels and chemicals, with over 2,200 unique Intellectual Property (IP) entities protected in over 100 countries. Sasol has re-architected its IP protection program to allow for much more efficient control of the IP management by migrating from a relational database system to a centralized XML-based structure that is accessed by users in six continents.

"Skytide has become an essential part of the Sasol IP program, handling the complex analytics of the XML data. After reviewing numerous analytical packages, the Skytide Analytical Platform was the only one that could directly analyze the XML data and produce the complicated reports Sasol required," explained Jim O'Hare, Partner, Arnav Technology Solutions, Inc., a Systems Integrator for Sasol. "Skytide is a next-generation analytical engine, which can easily handle the complex hierarchical XML data involved in Sasol's rapidly-growing IP program."

Sasol selected Skytide based on its ability to:

-- Execute complex analytics on high volumes of data in a timely manner;

-- Scale beyond the current limit of approximately 110,000 information objects to allow a virtually unlimited number of entities to be added over time;

-- Generate mission-critical reports not possible with its previous relational database structure;

-- Easily produce 'ad-hoc' reports;

-- Perform data migration Quality Assurance by providing immediate exception analysis during data migration.

"Protecting Sasol's numerous IP entities is critical. As we add up to 30 new innovations every month, Skytide will provide income-generation analysis of our IP processes while reducing potential IP risks," stated Morné Barradas, IP Patent Attorney, Sasol.