HOLLYWOOD, Fla.—GigaSpaces Technologies plans to enter into a partnership with SpringSource to more directly support the Spring Framework.
Geva Perry, chief marketing officer at GigaSpaces, said his company plans to announce a partnership with SpringSource, where the two companies will engage in joint marketing, promotions, training and education, and support.
GigaSpaces’ eXtreme Application Platform is considered a “scale-out” architecture, or middleware that enables users to deliver dynamic scalability for high-volume transactional applications, Perry said in an interview with eWEEK here at the Spring Experience conference, SpringSource’s user conference. Spring helps to simplify that.
“Spring has become the standard for programming in enterprise Java,” Perry said. “We decided to go with an open, standards-based approach and we made Spring our primary API. We opened that and we call it OpenSpaces. It’s a no-brainer for us to do a partnership with SpringSource since it is our flagship API.”
The way the partnership will work is that “GigaSpaces can be your scale-out solution,” Perry said. “You might call it ‘Scalable Spring.’ If you have an application you want to scale, you can basically switch to GigaSpaces with no code change.”
He said the GigaSpaces partnership with SpringSource could be announced as early as Dec. 17.
“We’re going to go after Spring users to replace their J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition] application servers,” Perry said. “Spring has helped make our product simpler and easy to use. And that’s given it more mainstream developer appeal.”
He said GigaSpaces is poised to take advantage of the shift to cloud computing and distributed computing scale-out architectures that companies like Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook and others have pursued.
“These guys went ahead and built their own infrastructure; we’re creating the middleware that provides you with the tools to do that scale-out,” Perry said. “Our goal is no less ambitious than becoming the middleware standard for this scale-out architecture.”
With GigaSpaces, “from a programming model, there’s no need to know about threads or parallel programming,” he said.
Perry, like SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson, said that early on in the enterprise Java world, when the Java application server was seen as a one-size-fits-all technology, it could not do everything. Supporting a scale-out architecture for extreme transaction processing requires a broader solution, Perry said.
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“Our product is a full application platform that tries to solve this problem end-to-end,” he said.
Perry said he does not believe that GigaSpaces has many direct commercial competitors because of this, although he admitted that Tangosol, now known as Oracle Coherence after its acquisition by Oracle, has been a rival.
Yet, GigaSpaces continues to grow. In 2007, the company doubled its number of employees and had triple-digit growth in revenues, Perry said.
“In terms of competition, we’re holding our own and we’ve beaten Tangosol in many accounts, even now that they’re part of Oracle,” Perry said. “I think being independent helped us.”
GigaSpaces customers include leaders in the financial services, telecommunications sectors and government institutions, including Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Dow Jones, Virgin Mobile and Nortel Networks.
Meanwhile, although GigaSpaces got its start in the Java world, “we have a .Net solution, a purely C++ solution, and we can deliver seamless integration between your Java and .Net solution,” Perry said.
He said GigaSpaces has a relationship with Microsoft around Excel, which is heavily used in financial services solutions, particularly on Wall Street.
“Excel was never meant to be a very scalable shared resource,” Perry said. “What we’re doing with Microsoft is we’ve developed a solution where on the back end there’s this scalable, low-latency system based on GigaSpaces, and on the front end they have Excel.”
Perry said GigaSpaces has a large opportunity for a scale-out solution in the Microsoft environment. “There’s nothing in the .Net world that addresses these problems,” he said.
Meanwhile, on Dec. 10 GigaSpaces launched the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge, which will award $25,000 in prizes to developers who build the most unique and innovative applications or plug-ins for the OpenSpaces Framework. Prizes range from $1,000 to $10,000.
Moreover, in November, GigaSpaces announced the GigaSpaces Start-Up Program, which provides qualified startup companies and individuals with full, free and perpetual use of XAP, the company’s flagship product.
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