GigaSpaces charts progress into the cloud
Matt Aslett & John Barr, The 451 Group
GigaSpaces has 76 customers deploying its eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) software on cloud-computing platforms, up from 25 on Amazon's EC2 in February. The company is also working with GoGrid and is lining up partnerships with the likes of VMware and Rackspace as it focuses its attention on growing interest in hybrid private/public cloud deployments. GigaSpaces admits that most customers are currently using cloud platforms for testing and prototyping, but sees an opportunity for XAP to provide a bridge between public and private platforms.
GigaSpaces told us it had committed its future to the cloud earlier this year and noted that it had expected hybrid clouds – with customers deploying workloads on both private and public computing resources. The company now has 76 customers deployed on cloud platforms, up from 25 in February, and four of those are hybrid deployments. One example is a telco running a call center application in the cloud for customer self-service, as well as on-premises for call center users. A recent example of a cloud-only customer is Advanced Gaming Labs, which used GigaSpaces on Amazon EC2 to create and run a multiplayer casino application for Facebook.
GigaSpaces now claims 320 users in total, up from 150 in November 2008, although it notes that half of its customers are Start-Up Program users who do not pay for XAP, yet. The Start-Up Program is aimed at businesses with less than $1m in revenue, so GigaSpaces should gain from widespread adoption as they grow. The company has also been reducing its headcount as part of a move to an indirect model, although it is not currently talking about its employee numbers. GigaSpaces has opted to leave professional services to partners while focusing on product sales and support.
The company still has strong roots in the financial services sector, which was an early adopter for the company's early data caching and later distributed application server software, although financial services now accounts for just 40% of revenue, rather than two-thirds in 2007. Other target markets include e-commerce and gaming, while recent customer wins include ProRail, which manages the infrastructure for the Dutch National Railway and is using XAP to optimize train routes in an effort to improve punctuality and reduce energy consumption.
GigaSpaces began life as a provider of application-caching functionality, but like early rivals Tangosol (now owned by Oracle) and GemStone Systems, it quickly added read/write and transactional capabilities to position itself as a next-generation application server vendor. GigaSpaces' focus on the cloud has taken it away from its traditional rivals, although the company still sees Oracle and GemStone as its closest rivals, especially if the opportunity is driven by a need for data-grid functionality. Other competitors include IBM's WebSphere eXtreme Scale (formerly known as ObjectGrid), and while Microsoft's Velocity project will be a .NET-only in-memory data cache, it is likely to have an impact in Microsoft-heavy environments.
GigaSpaces claims not to see pure caching vendors and technologies as competitors given its advanced application server functionality. However, we believe that the recent increase in corporate backing for memcached and the continued success of Terracotta, the open source Java caching specialist, are likely to impact the company at the low end.
