Mr AKR Jeeva: Being close to industry partners allows us to collaborate with them for better integration.

Electron Database Corporation (Electron) is working on a high performance OLTP (online transaction processing) database which will take advantage of new computing and storage technologies. It has also set up an engineering centre in Singapore to enhance industry partnerships which are critical to the company’s product development success.

According to Mr AKR Jeeva, Chief Executive Officer of Electron, the company found out early on that there was an opportunity to develop a modern database software based on new paradigms that could significantly impact businesses.

“Our research helped us to understand that the bottlenecks in performance of enterprise computing infrastructure and computer applications were largely due to the growing difference between the current hardware technology and database software,” he said. “With the advent of SSD (solid state  device) and its transition into the enterprise hardware market, we realised that the difference will grow even more rapidly.”

Current database software was written 20 years ago and has yet to take advantage of the advancements in hardware such as multi-core technology, 64-bit computing and SSD, said Mr Jeeva.

“The idea was to create an indigenous industry standard SQL (structured query language) database that will free up enterprises from incurring high costs for higher performance and scalability,” he said. “When released, Electron will be the only OLTP database that will provide high performance beyond current industry standards by running on both hard disk-based and advanced SSD-based hardware.”

The expected performance benefits are expected to reduce the cost of the current database computing infrastructure by 60 per cent, he noted, and is particularly suited for today’s architectural requirements.

One important aspect of Electron’s database development process is its collaboration with industry partners like HP and Fujitsu. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the company set up an engineering centre in Singapore specifically for this purpose. “This is extremely important and critical for the successful development of the product,” said Mr Jeeva.

“Being close to industry partners allows us to collaborate with them for better integration and to leverage their expensive infrastructure to create a quality product that will host large-scale enterprise applications in the near future.”

“Electron participates in a very mature market and it is extremely important that we build a strong alliance to transition ourselves into the enterprise market,” he added.

Mr Jeeva also paid tribute to Singapore’s comprehensive infocomm ecosystem comprising industry partners, a global work force, venture capitalist community and complementary government programmes.

Easy access to industry partners and the support of grant programmes from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) were instrumental in the company’s decision to set up its operations in Singapore, he said.

Electron is currently pursuing the TPC benchmark certification process to validate its technology for high performance.

“The plans are to raise more than S$10 million by the second quarter of 2011 and by partnering with companies like HP and Fujitsu, Electron looks ahead to an explosive start that will create more job opportunities by end of next year,” said Mr Jeeva.