DELA CRUZ: 2005 was filled with a lot of projects. We started out with two games in 2003 and in 2004, technically we were still in startup mode. One of our biggest concerns then was that there was no backup. If there's an incident that the hard disk crashed then we'll have to restore for a week. If you're playing a game and you're on level 99 now and level 60 the previous week, (a disk crash) is unacceptable. A lot of kids will cry due to the wasted effort and time.When I came in the IT system and infrastructure was a little bit of a mess. There was no ventilation and cables were everywhere. All the time from 2004 to 2005, I started cleaning up and integrating all the IT servers. Cabling was a nightmare. We've deployed a central storage system setup so we don't have to worry about disks crashing. Up to that level were very happy. Then little did I know that Level-Up planned to bring in five more games this year in contrast to the two games during the previous years. That's why from a small number of servers we up to more than 500 servers. New projects continue and the problem with that much number of servers is maintenance and keeping track. We don't like to write anything down and more servers mean more integrators.

CW: Moving towards 2006, what else do you plan to improve?

This year we're also looking for an e-wallet type of bidding system. We used to sell everything prepaid. But that means that game time is fixed and value is fixed for every game. If we do the e-wallet type, then every user can have one card and specify how much they want to spend for any of the games and be able to play multiple games using the same card.

Security is also one of our greatest concerns. We're doing strong authentication for critical resources. Level-Up is putting in systems that will have stronger authentication such as biometrics which is generally a dynamic password. The integrity of the game rests a lot in the credibility of the security system. The database is the crown jewel of every company.

At present, we have around 60,000 users at any given moment. And that's for Ragnarok only. It's our biggest killer application so far but we also expect it to have the 'sawa' factor as they move on to our new games. There's a new basketball game coming in and I'm very excited about it. It's like an online NBA live 2006.