CEO IT
April 19, 2002

Seamless Communications

Leow Chee Tong’s dream of setting up his own company has come true. Based on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology available today, GridNode was set up to realise the potential of Peer-to-Peer technology to enhance communications between companies, suppliers and customers. Although the best example of a company that uses P2P is Napster, Leow believes that the same technology can deliver economies of scale and decentralisation required for extended enterprise management.

by CEO IT

PRIOR TO FOUNDING the company GridNode, Leow Chee Tong was the Director of the High-Tech Industry Business Unit for Asia Pacific at SAP for six years. During his tenure, he lived and worked in many places throughout Asia Pacific. One of his most memorable and valuable experiences – which firmly placed him a solid foundation towards building his own business – was his experience in setting up the SAP subsidiary in Taiwan from ground up to establish its presence as a market leader.

The Developer’s Dream
To develop a useful software application that can do the job required is a challenge considering the complexities of the market scenarios. This is particularly so for software that can connect many heterogeneous systems together without spending huge sums of money to enable such disparate systems to communicate seamlessly.

Simply put, GridNode’s objective is to develop software products that enable customers to connect with their business partners in a virtual trading network. This an enabler that facilitates communication and information exchange without the need for expensive central server computers.

“Before I joined SAP, I worked as a software developer in Fisher Rosemount where I developed my skills in software engineering. Since then, I have always wanted to build my own software company,” said Leow. “In my last two years with SAP, I was involved in SAP’s initiative in developing its own Supply Chain Management (SCM) software. I realised that for SCM to render maximum results, there is a crucial need for a better way of sharing information and improving supply chain visibility among the trading partners via the Internet.”

At that time, ICQ (an acronym for “I Seek You”) was gaining tremendous popularity in the personal messaging space. This is due to its ability to allow individuals to communicate with instant messaging over the Internet. It was like a virtual messaging network with peer-to-peer communication. All that is needed for this form of communication is a PC with Internet access.



“Success actually comes only if the company that
leverages on technology can solve the customer’s
problems in a cost- effective way.”
“I saw a great potential in leveraging similar peer-to-peer technology for inter-enterprise information and message exchange,” said Leow. “The next thing was, I got together a group of friends, who shared my aspirations, to set up GridNode.” The name was chosen as ‘Grid’ has the connotation of ‘Grid Computing’, while ‘Node’ relates to the concept of ‘peers’ and also an acronym for ‘Network Oriented Deployed Enterprise’.

Although Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking is never positioned to replace the client/ server solutions, P2P is positioned to complement the client/server model to deliver inter-enterprise applications, because of its relatively lower cost of implementation but effective connectivity based on Internet technologies.

Challenges
In this industry where the ability to reduce complexity and enable companies to communicate seamlessly is vital, Leow believes GridNode stands a good chance to be relevant to the market.

“We are seeing business processes routinely crossing organisational, geographical, and technology boundaries. There is no single person, organisation or application that will understand or control the entire business process, end-to-end,” said Leow. “Processess grow organically to include multiple, disparate applications, systems, information and people.”

Leow noticed that many business processes are still largely manual, ad-hoc, iterative, and paper-intensive, especially at the edge of the Internet. The traditional linear supply chains will evolve into networked supply chains that rapidly links up business partners with the right components, technology and services for the customers. Everything is becoming fundamentally distributed, making centralisation impractical and unrealistic.

The challenges lie in integrating these business processes and systems together at the most cost-effective manner, delivering maximum value and ROI to the customers.

Core Competency
GridNode’s core business evolves around the end-to-end connectivity across the supply-chain continuum between the vendors, suppliers and customers.

“We are a software company and our core competency is product development utilising innovative technologies. We sell our products through channel partners and we leverage on our SI partners to provide the bulk of the professional services to our customers. Our model is always to deliver maximum value to our customers, partners and shareholders through innovative software solutions that meet the stringent business requirements of our customers,” said Leow.

“In order to survive in long term, we have to focus on the value we can bring to our customers, partners, shareholders and employees. We will achieve our objectives through a strong focus on profit through careful, bootstrap financial planning. In any business that wants to survive in the longer-term, revenue is vanity, without sane profit and real cash flow.”

“The key lesson that we have learnt about this business is that technology will not create a successful company. Success actually comes only if the company that leverages on technology can solve the customer’s problems in a cost-effective way,” concluded Leow.

About GridNode
GridNode was established in early 2000. GridNode’s mission is to provide enabling technology and software for business-to-business integration (B2Bi) and collaboration. Builit on the innovative peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, the software allows for back-to-back integration across different trading partners in the supply chain, regardless of the client’s information systems. Its company headquarters is based in Singapore with offices in Taipei (Taiwan) and Redwood City (USA). It has the funding from venture capitalists such as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Walden International, TIF Ventures and the First Taiwan Venture Capital. Its partners includes RosettaNet, SUN Microsystems, Intel, BEA Systems, mySQL, RSA Security, TIE Commerce, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.