FOR years, companies like Oracle and International Business Machines (IBM) invested heavily to build new markets in China for their industry-leading databases.

Now, boosted in part by escalating China-U.S. trade tensions, one Chinese upstart is stepping in, winning over tech giants, startups and financial institutions to its enterprise software.

Beijing-based PingCAP already counts more than 300 Chinese customers. Many, including food delivery giant Meituan, its bike-sharing service Mobike and smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp., are migrating away from Oracle and IBM’s services toward PingCAP’s, encapsulating a nation’s resurgent desire to homemade technologies.

PingCAP’s ascendancy comes as the U.S. cuts Huawei Technologies Co. off from key technology, sending chills through the country’s largest entities while raising questions about the security of foreign-made products. That’s a key concern as Chinese companies modernize systems in every industry from finance and manufacturing to health care by connecting them to the Internet.

“A lot of firms that used to resort to Oracle or IBM thought replacing them was a distant milestone, they never thought it would happen tomorrow,” said Huang Dongxu, PingCAP’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “But now they are looking at plan B very seriously.”

China has long encouraged the use of homegrown technology, particularly in sensitive hardware. That imperative has birthed global names like Huawei and Oppo and even carried over into software in recent years, as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. expand into cloud services.

(SD-Agencies)