Team

K.S. Bhaskar

President

K.S. Bhaskar led GT.M from 1995 to 2017. He joined the GT.M team as VP Engineering and eventually became the President of Greystone Software, GT.M’s developer. When Greystone Software was purchased by Sanchez Computer Associates, the original developer of what is now the ultra-scalable FIS Profile real-time core-banking system, Bhaskar continued to lead GT.M as the VP of the GT.M Group, a leadership that continued as Sanchez Computer was in turn purchased and became one of the predecessor companies of FIS (NYSE: FIS). During his tenure, GT.M transitioned from a database engine used in successful but modest deployments, to one that is at the heart of several of the world’s largest real-time core-banking systems, as well a nationwide electronic health record system.

In 2017, Bhaskar left FIS and founded YottaDB LLC, as he believes the proven GT.M code base can be more approachable and has applications beyond the narrow range of FIS’ remit.

Bhaskar spent most of his pre-GT.M career in the electronics test and measurement industry. During his tenure as VP of Engineering, Asyst Software Technologies in Rochester, NY (a subsidiary of Keithley Instruments) he developed VIEWDAC, the first 32-bit real-time laboratory data acquisition software. Earlier in his career, he led the software team of the Fluke 9010A Microsystem Troubleshooter, widely used for troubleshooting microprocessor based systems, including the Rockwell-Collins radio altimeter used in the Boeing 757 and 767.

Bhaskar earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Washington-Seattle.

A geek at heart, Bhaskar installs and manages Linux systems at work and at home, and has used Linux as his primary desktop since 1999. Bhaskar only recently discovered the joys of owning a dog, and spends time with Emmy, a new love in his life. In addition to exercise, going for long walks with Emmy gives him time to think.

Narayanan Iyer

Chief Architect

Although his first job after graduation was writing network software, Narayanan Iyer had long wanted to work in databases and jumped at the chance to join Bhaskar at Greystone in 1997 as an entry level developer. Over the next several years, his passion for databases led him to his role as the GT.M Chief Architect. His deep knowledge of the internal architecture of database engines in general, and GT.M in particular, provided the leadership that brought GT.M (with FIS Profile as the application) many firsts. Among these firsts is the first transaction processing system with unlimited geographic separation between data centers for business continuity with eventual consistency that ensured not just database state but also the path through state-space, the first real-time core-banking system to break the 1,000 online transaction per second barrier (with every transaction having full ACID properties), the first core banking system to go live on Linux, and much more.

In 2017, Narayanan joined Bhaskar at YottaDB to continue enhancing his favorite code base and to allow it to benefit the broadest possible range of applications.

Naryanan earned his Bachelor’s degree from Anna University in Chennai and a Master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, both in Computer Science.

When he is not working, Narayanan enjoys chess on his phone. He discovered his love for tennis too late in life to become another Federer, but plays and competes enthusiastically at his club. His young children remind him that there is as much joy to be found in a woolly caterpillar in their yard as there is in blowing bubbles.

Steve Estes

Senior Staff Engineer (Retired)

Steve Estes enjoys designing and coding low level software dealing with register allocation, stack frames, cache coherency, and compiler code generation.

Starting at Greystone in 1996, he was responsible for many of the scripting language and run-time system enhancements to GT.M. Steve was behind the phased migration of GT.M from a 32-bit architecture to a 64-bit architecture, transforming code generation from custom code to a table-and-template driven structure that allows it to be ported more easily to new CPU architectures. In addition, he gave GT.M the ability to place generated object code in shared libraries and then in shared memory so that tens of thousands of concurrent processes can execute the same code with a minimal memory footprint (the latter while allowing the code to be compiled on demand and dynamically updated so that all processes can run code as it is updated during their lifetimes), and much more.

In 2017, Steve joined Bhaskar at YottaDB, to continue enhancing the YottaDB/GT.M code base to make it accessible to new classes of users.

Prior to his tenure with GT.M, Steve worked at IBM for several years, initially supporting CP/CMS for IBM Research, including helping to migrate it from 24-bit addressing to 31-bit addressing, and later working on the port of the iSeries from a 32-bit CISC architecture CPU to the 64/65-bit RISC architecture CPU it now shares with the pSeries. Subsequently, he also worked on the Model 204 database at the then Computer Corporation of America.

In addition to undergraduate courses at the University of Connecticut, Steve’s training includes internal technical classes at IBM as well as training at Red Hat.

While he has played just about every type of guitar when he is not programming, Steve’s passion is heavy metal guitar. He owns over a dozen guitars and even more amplifiers, and enjoys building and modifying vacuum-tube based guitar amps. Whenever he is in need of fresh air, Steve enjoys fresh and salt-water fishing.