2009 was not a simple year for anyone in our business. Luckily we were able to turn the crisis into an opportunity to build a stronger, leaner company, and focus on the innovations that really make a difference for our customers. 

A Stronger, Leaner Company

GigaSpaces XAP now fully supports VMware. XAP speeds up complex virtualization projects by leveraging existing skills, supporting popular standards and offering pre-configured images and demos. Using VMware with XAP also dramatically improves ROI, by bringing virtualization to more applications - including enterprise applications demanding dynamic scalability, high performance and resilience.

Learn more about XAP VMware support

A while back we announced full support for GoGrid's hardened, secured, customizable cloud hosting service for the enterprise. Now XAP's GoGrid Server Images (GSIs) are publicly available for all GoGrid users - completely free of charge! Until March 31, 2010, GoGrid users can evaluate the most robust Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for Java and .NET, with full functionality, paying standard GoGrid prices. Following March 31, XAP will be available at an additional fee.

Distributed computing systems, whether in a local data center or on the cloud, are extremely difficult to troubleshoot. When a problem occurs, gathering basic information involves connecting to each machine individually (this can mean dozens or hundreds of machines), generating a system dump and downloading logs. What's more, it is almost impossible to get this information in real time, immediately after an error occurs - not to mention getting it when it's most needed, before the error occurs. 

The first GigaSpaces Cloud Crowd event, held in London in November, brought together top professionals who are using XAP to cloud-enable their hard-core enterprise applications.

The new world of cloud computing and virtualization introduces totally new security challenges, which require innovative solutions. One of the major challenges is how to secure a middleware component – such as a data grid or a messaging server – which is shared across many applications, not dedicated to one particular application.

Gartner has just released its long-awaited report, “Who’s Who in Application Platforms for Cloud Computing,” (Natis et al., 16 September 2009), which reviews Application Platforms as a Service (APaaS, delivered as a service) and Service-Enabled Application Platforms (SEAP, delivered in a traditional model for on-premise use). These provide not only cloud infrastructure, but also middleware and development services required to deploy and run cloud applications.

GigaSpaces is one of “85 Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud”, according to Internet.com’s Datamation website for IT managers, alongside giants like Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, SalesForce.com, Oracle, VMware, HP and SAP. The list of vendors is aimed to “provide a real-time snapshot of an important emerging trend”.

British American Tobacco, a member of the Fortune Global 100 and the world’s second largest quoted tobacco group by global market share, with brands sold in more than 180 markets, is implementing GigaSpaces XAP to power the data hub for its mobile sales solution. The solution will serve British American Tobacco’s sales representatives, who will use handheld devices to place orders, schedule deliveries, review customer accounts and access other information from the company’s CRM system.