S’PORE STARTUP MAKES GLOBAL SECURITY CONTEST
By Vivian Yeo
ZDNet Asia
Monday, September 29, 2008 07:36 PM
Asia
SINGAPORE–A local company has secured a spot in the finals of the
Global Security Challenge 2008, an annual competition to identify
promising security startups across the globe.
Singapore’s Hiperware and Armenian company Precision Sensors
Instrumentation, edged out three other semi-finalists in the Asian leg
of the competition held last Friday. The two companies will join four
other finalists from the Americas and Europe on Nov. 13 in London,
to vie for the top prize of US$500,000.
Amey Laud, CEO of Hiperware, told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview
Tuesday his company earned a nod to the final as "Hiperware’s
technology addresses a pertinent problem among counter-terrorism
agencies, which is timely reaction and intervention against terrorist
attacks".
"While countries have invested much in surveillance infrastructure,
what is missing is a systematic means to provide a ‘big picture’ from
surveillance feeds and [more] importantly, to do this in a timely
manner, no matter how many feeds need to be processed," he added.
Initiated by the London Business School in 2006, the Global Security
Challenge is a security contest that aims to bring together security
innovators, startups and investors around the world.
A whitepaper from Hiperware describes the company’s offering as a
middle-ware platform built on Java, allowing businesses to develop,
test and deploy software across multiple cores, computers or virtual
machines. The technology allows for software tasks to be divided
or partitioned across a number of computers, CPU-cores or virtual
machines, and coordinates these different tasks to work together.
Hiperware’s technology is targeted at various high-performance
computing (HPC) or real-time processing-type applications, such
as industrial process monitoring, business reporting, business
intelligence, scalable e-commerce, science and research, and defense
and homeland security.
The Singapore startup’s business partners have developed four
applications to run on its platform, including HiperSearch, a real-time
search engine that provides instantaneous monitoring of information
processes, according to a corporate factsheet.
Available as a software-as-a-service model, HiperSearch is targeted at
the J-Sox market in Japan and the BPO (business process outsourcing)
industry in India. It was built to address the needs of organizations
that have significant work around security and compliance.
According to the Global Security Challenge Web site, venture
capitalists forked out a total of US$90 million in funds–between
July and September this year–to support security startups.
The winners and finalists from the previous two Global Security
Challenge contests collectively raised more than US$37 million in
new venture capital, angel investments and grants.