Gigaspaces is one of the leading vendors, providing solutions to overcome the limitations of application performance/scaling due to bottlenecks at the database level or due to the application architecture following a tier based approach.
Gigaspaces received a series C funding of $ 5 million, lead by BRM capital, raising the total to $13 million. Besides BRM the other stakeholders are Intel Capital and FTVentures. FTVentures, a private equity firm, is known for its connections in the finance industry.
Gigaspaces strategy is to appeal to the engineers/developers. This is evident from the excellent employee blogs focused on the implementation details. This strategy seems to pay off pretty well. The next level of market penetration can happen only when the marketing message is simultaneously targeted at multiple levels, i.e. engineers/architects, managers, and C level executives with compelling business reasons that is uniquely offered by Gigaspaces in comparison to other products in the same market segment.
The company offers two products, Extreme Application Platform (XAP), and Enterprise Data Grid (EDG), to scale out an application, regardless of whether the application is hosted in house (in an enterprise’s datacenter), or in the cloud (for example in Amazon EC2 or GoGrid).
The product EDG is an in memory data grid that solves the application performance and scaling issues imposed by a relational database. Traditionally application architectures involving a relational database, employ replication, partitioning or clustering topologies to overcome such issues. However, EDG uses the servers RAM to provide object based database capabilities in memory requiring no modifications to the database.
The product XAP is an infrastructure software platform providing full scale out capability to applications. XAP is compatible with JEE. With JEE support, Gigaspaces wants a share in the Java application server market. For example, XAP can execute a Java application instead of executing it in a traditional application server such as Weblogic. The motivation to this rationale (from a technical viewpoint) is that, performance and scalability bottlenecks are not always limited to database, it may be due to communication mechanisms such as, for example, messaging between applications or in the application server tier itself. Thus end to end latency issues can be addressed, by using XAP. Some vendors (Appistry, IBM Websphere XD, GridGain, and Data Synapse) use a grid computing approach to overcome scalability issues for high performance computing applications. However XAP uses a Space Based Architecture (SBA) approach borrowing from the Java Spaces Specification. The challenge to adopting SBA architectural style is the change in the mindset from using the traditional tiered based architectural patterns. However, arguably, the benefits of using SBA are in availing linear scalability, high availability, and simplified infrastructure among other things, which outweigh the benefits of traditional tiered based architectural styles.
Some prominent vendors providing similar services that Gigaspaces is up against are: IBM Object Grid, IBM Websphere XD, Appistry, Oracle Coherence, Memcache, Terracotta (open source), and Ncache from Alachisoft, Scaleout Software, EhCache (open Source), Open Symphony’s OSCache (open Source), GridGain (open source), Azul Systems and Data Synapse, JBoss, Glassfish, Oracle Weblogic, etc.
The SWOT analysis of Gigaspaces is mentioned below.
