netalone.com Invests $3.6M into Lecco SQL Technology

Hong Kong Internet company netalone.com has just announced a HK$28 million (US$3.60 million) investment into SQL technology through Lecco Technology (LeccoTech) on April 16, in exchange for an equity stake of 15 percent.

William Lo, chairman and CEO of netalone, will join the board of directors of LeccoTech after completion of formal agreements.

Given the state of the market following last week s tech stocks freefall, IT Daily asked Lo if the current situation had caused a doublethink on this investment.

Obviously we are seeing a big and significant correction to the market but I am not too bearish on this because I think to a certain degree, a correction is going to be good for the industry as a whole because there is just too much confusion in the market, Lo replied.

Over the last twelve months a lot of property-listed companies in Hong Kong are saying that they are doing high tech but without actually knowing what high tech is about," he went on. "Or, a lot of companies are just buying new or acquiring companies and working more like an investment under more than an operating company.

He hoped that the correction would be able to separate the true Internet companies from the false ones as well as pick out the right business model for the future.

That is, I think, if you are an Internet company but doing things like on the infrastructure side meaning either hardware or software provisioning, he said. You are going to be able to sustain business despite the storm rather than if you are just an investment company. Hopefully this wave of correction is going to see flight to quality as well.

LeccoTech is a software development company established in 1995. Its main product is a software solution called Lecco SQL Expert, which is a Windowsbased SQL performance tuning tool for relational database management systems (RDBMS) that currently supports three major database platforms, namely Oracle, Sybase and MS SQL Server.

The solution is made up of a number of distinctive modules including SQL Scanner, and Syntactical SQL Optimizer.

The company intends to broaden the existing product line into other popular database platforms like IBM DB2 Universal Database and Informix in the very near future.

Currently, the Lecco SQL Expert is used by companies like Hong Kong International Terminals (HIT), Cable & Wireless HKT, Reuters Asia, Intel, Merrill Lynch, Ericsson UK and Chase Manhattan Bank, to improve system performance.