Interview with General Manager of RELEX in «Connect!» Magazine

Igor BOYCHENKO: «Strategically important industries need real Russian solutions»

Interview with General Manager of RELEX Group

- What solutions developed by your company are available to the defense industry organizations today?

- RELEX has always been oriented towards the Russian industry, including defense industry. We make secure solutions without borrowing components of free software. We understand our responsibility before the customers, many of whom represent strategically important areas like military industry. RELEX has been working with defense industry companies since its inception, both delivering packaged solutions and developing custom software.

- DBMS Linter is your flagship product. How great is the demand for it now? What are its key parameters?

– Our spectrum of users is widening from year to year. Besides government structures and military industry, the interest to our DBMS is growing among representatives of nuclear, oil-and-gas and chemical industry, finances and trade. Another encouraging fact is that Linter is in demand not only in Russia but also in Southwest Asia, one of the most technological regions of the world. In 2011, the Japanese company Brycen published the news that over 30 million licenses for the embedded version of the system have been sold during only five years. They consider Linter the best embedded solution in its class. The system is characterized by a number of parameters each of which plays an important or even a key role in a particular sphere in which the end solution is applied. The key parameters of Linter are:

• an extensive set of utilities and interfaces;
• a large number of operating systems supported; very high fault-tolerance;
• ability to work with strictly limited resources;
• real-time support;
• easy embeddability. The majority of Linter users add the high proficiency and responsiveness of our technical support service to this list.

It must be also noted that Linter is the only DBMS fully developed in Russia and certified by the Russian Ministry of Defense and FSTEC as compliant with Class 3 and 2 requirements for protection from unauthorized access and Level 2 of undeclared capabilities absence.

- What applications usually use your product? What security, compatibility and real-time support requirements do your customers impose?

- Linter-based applications are very versatile in their functionality and areas of use. Our DBMS is entrusted nuclear reactor control, oil production, air traffic security, the work of machines, household appliances and mobile applications. The requirements to Linter are even more diverse and depend on the customers' purposes. As to the security of stored and processed information at the DBMS level, the requirements may range from personal data protection to state secret security. Speaking of compatibility, the customers need cross-platform capabilities and support of all the most popular utilities and interfaces. In terms of real-time support, the DBMS must provide fully functional work of the application 24×7 and guarantee the fault-tolerance of the system.

- Being Russian developers, how would you rate the prospects of native software in the defense industry? What factors does this depend upon?

– It will depend on the support of the Russian software developers on the corporate and user level. If the state goes on being interested only in foreign or pseudo-Russian developments (created using free foreign software), especially in strategically important areas, very soon we will stay without native science and technologies, and the country's economy and security will be threatened. Adaptation of imported products towards the demands of the Russian users is not always the best option, there are things more important that fast guaranteed profit.

- Which recent projects implemented for defense industry companies seem the most important to you and why?

- It is hard to say which of the projects implemented by RELEX for the defense industry do stand out – all of them are innovative, challenging and significant from the point of view of results. Among the most memorable ones:

• creation of a secure version of DBMS Linter for the Russian Ministry of Defense (known as DBMS Linter-VS);
• creation of a Linter based space control center by the customer's specialists;
• development of a Linter version for the real-time OS2000 environment;
• development of an automated geopositioning software management system and geoinformational data warehouse generation system for the army;
• development of a Linter-based transparent client application switch system used in case of hot backup copying node failure;
• creation of a Linter-based military action modeling system by the customer's team.