CTO's Note: Highlights of 2009, Outlook for 2010 - Enterprise Middleware as a Service

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

Despite the terrible economic environment, we added several major customers, including one of the Big Four U.S. banks and one of the two global leaders in financial information services. We gained a lot of traction with ISV/OEM partners, many of which are using GigaSpaces to SaaS-enable their applications - an interesting example is Primatics, an on-demand risk management platform processing more than $25 billion in mortgages. We also increased our global coverage through new solution partners across the US, Europe and APAC, such as Network Cadence, a leading IT consultancy for the communications industry. Lastly, changes to our support and professional services organization proved very successful and increased customer satisfaction, something I'm particularly proud of.

Highlights of 2009: Improved Robustness, Simplicity, Cloud/Virtualization Support

On the product front, in case you missed the buzz, the release of GigaSpaces 7.0 in July was a major success. The new version was hailed by press and analysts as the only cloud-enabled application server, with "at least a year's competitive advantage" over Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. We've seen strong take-up of the new version and very positive feedback from existing customers, who consider XAP 7.0 to be simpler and more robust.

We have also added tight integration with GoGrid (alongside existing integration with Amazon EC2) and VMware vSphere, and are working on integration with the hardware behind today's new computing environments, including Cisco's Unified Computing System. XAP is currently the only product that allows existing applications to run on a private or public cloud, in virtualized environments, or in a traditional data center – with no code changes. This allows our customers to choose a mix of public cloud, private cloud, and traditional data center infrastructure, without getting locked into a particular environment.

Outlook for 2010: Enterprise Middleware as a Service, SaaS-Enabled Offering for ISVs/OEM

In 2010 we will focus on two key initiatives:

• Enterprise middleware as a service - our goal is to enable users to use our data grid, messaging or Map/Reduce services by calling a single API, without worrying about installation, configuration or setup. GigaSpaces middleware, with its enterprise-grade transaction support, administration tools and security, will be just as simple to consume as services like Amazon SimpleDB. Any application, whether it is running on-premises in a traditional or virtualized data center, or on the cloud, will be able to access our middleware services on-demand. As part of our goal to reduce locking, we'll continue to add support for standards - next up is support for JPA and the memcached API. In addition, we'll be adding a REST interface to better address web-based and cloud-based applications.* All this won't affect existing users of XAP - it will just give them one more way to access XAP middleware from within their applications. Join our webinar on January 19, 2010 and hear more details about this initiative.
• Dedicated SaaS-enabled offering for ISVs/OEM - following our success with SaaS-enablement projects for ISVs and other OEM partners, in 2010 we will invest in a dedicated SaaS-enabled offering for this market. Our new offering will enable ISVs to use existing code written for a single-tenant environment, and run it on a fully multi-tenant environment, whether in a virtualized data center, in a full-blown private cloud, or on the public cloud. We will offer on-demand services with a highly competitive pay-per-use pricing model, designed to appeal to OEM projects.

(*) Support for JPA, REST and memcached API is planned for Q3-4 2010.

In addition to these initiatives, we will continue to strengthen GigaSpaces XAP and our core middleware offering. The upcoming XAP 7.1 release will showcase a new and completely revolutionary set of real-time troubleshooting tools, which provide the specific information users need to prevent a problem, before it occurs. We are working closely with hardware partners, including Cisco Systems, to allow existing applications to make very efficient use of new multicore and large memory hardware. And of course, we will continue adding support for popular cloud and virtualization vendors - next up is integration with RackSpace.

There's a lot going on - stay tuned during 2010 for a few more surprises. Here's to a great new year!

Best regards,

Nati S.