SOURCE: GigaSpaces

November 08, 2007 09:00 ET

GigaSpaces Start-Up Program Delivers Extreme Application Platform (XAP) Free of Charge

Company Offers Free Access to Flagship Product; Allows Start-Ups to Build Applications on Highly Scalable Platform at No Cost

NEW YORK,--(Marketwire - November 8, 2007) - GigaSpaces Technologies today announced the GigaSpaces Start-Up Program, which provides qualified companies and individuals with full, free and perpetual use of the company's flagship product, GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP). The Start-Up Program enables organizations to gain access to the full-unconstrained commercial edition of GigaSpaces XAP without time, functionality or CPU limitations. Developers can build linearly scalable applications from day one, with zero upfront dollar investment in infrastructure software.

Today's Web 2.0 start-ups need to build applications that can quickly scale without requiring any change to the application architecture or code. Stories abound of start-ups who have suddenly experienced success on the Internet -- either on their own Web site or through a platform such as Facebook -- and then scramble to re-design their application to handle the growing loads, often after a publicly-humiliating web site crash. GigaSpaces XAP allows developers to build applications that can quickly and easily scale-out limitlessly across low-cost servers with zero or little code changes.

Vertical Acuity, an Atlanta, Ga.-based startup has joined the GigaSpaces Start-Up Program. "The GigaSpaces Start-Up Program allows Vertical Acuity to prepare, at low cost, for the inevitable complexities of scale and high availability that comes with providing enterprise services," said Brent Walker, chief technology officer, Vertical Acuity. "We fully expect GigaSpaces' industry leading products to enable us to gracefully extend our platform capacity as our client base grows." Vertical Acuity uniquely combines web analytics and contextual site analysis with the power of artificial intelligence. The end result is an unmatched ability to identify actionable trends in consumer behavior within vertical markets such as entertainment, automotive and consumer electronics.

Now, start-ups can benefit both from the technical scalability of the GigaSpaces platform, as well as from the economic flexibility of not having to pay any software license fees while their company is still ramping up its business.

"Many start-ups launch with the attitude of 'let's just build it and worry about scale later.' They then quickly realize that there is also a risk in not preparing for success," said Geva Perry, chief marketing officer, GigaSpaces. "The GigaSpaces XAP software allows programmers to build an application in a way that as demand grows, it can easily be met with zero architecture or code changes. You just throw in another box into your infrastructure and it scales linearly."

Miwok Airways, based in Burlingame, Calif., a startup air-taxi franchisor, is another company that has joined the program. In early 2008 Miwok will be launching a patent-pending reservations and yield-management platform that allows air travelers to arrange and influence dynamic pricing for on-demand flights in coordination with others via social networking, including with Facebook friends. "We expect our Web traffic and transaction volumes to grow rapidly -- especially given the social networking aspect of our service, which is very viral in nature," said Gad Barnea, chief executive officer and founder of Miwok. "Building our application on top of GigaSpaces ensures that we will be able to scale quickly, easily and reliably to meet this demand."

GigaSpaces defines qualifying participants as individuals and companies with less than $5 million in revenues. Upon acceptance into the Program, participants can use GigaSpaces XAP for any purpose with no time or functional constraints, including taking their application into production. Start-up program participants can use GigaSpaces web forums to get answers to support issues at no charge. Participants also qualify for a 50 percent discount for Silver, Gold or Platinum 24/7 support packages.

The GigaSpaces Start-Up Program marks the latest initiative by the company to provide the developer community with easy access to GigaSpaces' products and solutions. In its recent release of Version 6.0, GigaSpaces open-sourced its flagship API, OpenSpaces -- an extension of the Spring Framework, and will soon launch OpenSpaces.org, a community site that will allow code contributions under the Apache license.

Barnea of Miwok believes that GigaSpaces' support of the Spring Framework had a big impact for the company. "We had built our alpha application using Spring, but not for scale," he said. "We easily ported our beta version to GigaSpaces with no code changes, and now have a linearly scalable, high-performance application."

GigaSpaces also has a program that enables open source companies and projects to integrate their technologies with the GigaSpaces software and distribute the GigaSpaces free Community Edition. Open source products that have integrated under these programs include the Spring Framework, the open source ESB Mule, Java grid product GridGain and the Hibernate project.

Scaling-Out Applications on the Amazon Compute Cloud (EC2)

In addition to the flexible pricing for infrastructure software the program offers start-ups, GigaSpaces XAP can now also be used as part of the Amazon EC2 service, providing organizations with the additional benefit of paying only for as much hardware resources as are used, on demand.

Participants can receive support on the GigaSpaces support forums found at: http://www.gigaspaces.com/JForum/forums/list.page.

Companies who want to take advantage of GigaSpaces XAP using the Amazon EC2 service can start at: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=927

About GigaSpaces

GigaSpaces provides a single application software platform for application scalability and performance. GigaSpaces' unique approach enables developers to write their business logic as if writing to a single computer and then seamlessly scale out the application linearly anywhere, and on-demand. GigaSpaces customers include leaders in the financial services, telecommunications sectors and government institutions, including: Société Générale, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Dow Jones, Virgin Mobile, Nortel and Hutchison 3G, where the need for mission-critical high-performance, low-latency, reliability and scalability necessitates an alternative to traditional approaches. GigaSpaces was founded in 2000 and has offices worldwide.

For more information, please visit http://www.gigaspaces.com, or visit the company's blog at http://www.gigaspacesblog.com.