HOAM THE HO-AM FOUNDATION

Dr. Cha pioneered the field of in-memory database management since he joined Seoul National University in 1992. To scale up his early university research, he founded a startup, Transact In Memory, Inc., in Silicon Valley in 2002. The German software company SAP AG acquired this startup in late 2005. Since then, he led the conception and development of HANA, the world first enterprise-scale in-memory database platform which finally became available in the global market in 2012.

Before HANA, disks and SSDs were used as the primary storage of large-scale enterprise database. Running big analytics and machine learning was very slow and real-time processing was impossible because the substantial volume of data must move from slow external storage to computer’s DRAM. Leveraging advances in DRAM and multi-core CPU, HANA changed the industry paradigm by using DRAM memory as the primary storage of database and providing innovative software mechanisms of fast database recovery and parallel real-time run of big analytics and machine learning inside the database platform.

Today, HANA is used by more than 17,000 companies in the world such as Apple, Walmart, Toyota, CVS Health Corporation, and Samsung Electronics. It is also available as a database service on Google, Amazon, and MS clouds. With the success of HANA, the era of in-memory computing has begun. This paradigm shift of using large memory in computing contributed to the growth of the Korean semiconductor industry.

Dr. Cha is a researcher, innovator, and entrepreneur who not only led the paradigm shift of an industry dominated by big companies but also created a new model of scaling academic research to market-disruptive innovation. With this experience, he founded a new Graduate School of Data Science at Seoul National University to educate future innovators with challenging spirit.