Memory supplement

Start-ups with fast track aspirations are a daily occurrence in the frenzied communications marketplace. While some were the brainchildren of garage shop Silicon Valley programmers, others were founded from within forward-thinking divisions of well-known organizations.

In 1996, three Hewlett-Packard engineers assembled the data they had been working on for the last four years and spun off a new company, TimesTen Performance Software. The new start-up quickly began enhancing its in-memory database technology and commercializing it for the mass market.

After two years of preparation, in February 1998, the company unveiled TimesTen 2.0 and introduced it to the marketplace as an off-the-shelf alternative to in-house, custom-built in-memory databases. TimesTen has focused its efforts in two main areas: the converging voice and data networks and the Internet. Since 1998, it has accumulated a significant list of customers. Open standards-based technology, fast response times, flexibility and efficiency are some the main advantages that the company evangelizes.

"Our main focus is on real-time and application environments. Other companies are doing similar technologies, but none are focusing on the voice and data segment," said Tim Shetler, vice president of marketing at TimesTen. "We're also pursuing a second segment that involves new applications being developed around the Internet that have some of the same characteristics of voice and data. We're determined to stay focused on a small number of application profiles. We want to be viewed as a data management system that is focused on high availability."

Within the last month, TimesTen has won many followers that will adopt the upgraded version into their platforms. HP, a long-time user of the technology, will incorporate the TimesTen in-memory database into a future versio n of the HP OpenCall Intelligent Network platform. HP chose TimesTen's technology because it wanted to increase the scalability of its databases, which will allow carriers using HP's platform to deliver applications and services more cost-effectively and at a higher performance rate.

Lucent Technologies is another network equipment provider that has chosen the TimesTen product. The next generation of its WaveStar DACS 4/4/1 digital cross-connect system will include TimesTen's in-memory database. WaveStar DACS offers interconnect solutions for global networks.

Another customer win comes from Cisco Systems, which will use TimesTen's database in its telephony controller family. These products will help carriers access voice services using the data infrastructure. A Cisco spokesperson said the databases' open standards, speed and efficiency are key features for choosing the product.

One of TimesTen's wins on the Internet side is Bridgewater Systems, which provides Internet service providers, cable providers and network service providers with tools to create, provision and bill for new Internet services. Bridgewater's WideSpan Intelligent Network allows carriers to deliver and bundle services to customers. These services include managing real-time billing, customer and subscriber management and directory look-up.

"We were looking for a way of tracking dynamic data," said Kirby Koster, product manager with Bridgewater's WideSpan Intelligent Networks. "The traditional database systems are excellent at tracking static data, but our data changes thousands of times per second."

Time to market was another feature that attracted Koster to the TimesTen database. As an off-the-shelf product, the product allowed his engineering team to save about three to four months of development time. The technology will be included in the fall release of Bridgewater's Resource Management Server.