S'pore SaaS incubator adds three partners

SINGAPORE--AxSaaS, the country's recently announced SaaS incubator, said Tuesday three more partners have signed on.

Singapore Computer Systems (SCS), GigaSpaces and Haley join the existing pool of partners, which includes government agencies A*STAR and the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), as well as commercial partners Microsoft, SingTel and HP.

According to Alan Lye, managing director of Aksaas, which started the incubation center, systems integrator SCS is providing a grid computing platform of 4,000 CPU cores to power the set up provided to the startup hopefuls.

The servers will come from HP, which is also connecting the incubation center to HP's network of some 700 developer partner independent software vendors (ISVs), he told ZDNet Asia in a phone interview.

The backend infrastructure will be "accelerated" via GigaSpaces' middleware layer. "With the processing power accelerated, we're multiplying the power of the hardware we already have," said Lye.

This set up will be provided for incubated startups which have "tested and proven their services during the incubation period". They will be allowed to place their product on the grid to scale up production.

The grid will be located in SCS' head office, located in the Bedok South area of Singapore.

On the software side, Haley is providing its business rule automation software, designed to help shorten the time to market for the startups' products, said Lye.

"The business rule engine helps automate the tedious work of defining these rules in transactions...This way, developers can [market] their apps very quickly," he said.

Joanne Tee, vice president of Asia at Haley, said in a statement: "Saas is not only about cost, it is also about time to market and flexibility to adjust to changes."

Lye said in order to make a viable business out of utility computing, startups must have the platform to quickly test, market and push out their products to customers. "We have to reduce the cost of deploying and developing for these startups, to ease adoption."

He expects the first apps to be available to the public between three months to a year from now.