Thinking Out Cloud

Extreme Talent

We have a lot of kick-ass talent at GigaSpaces, but it's not every day you get an email like the one we got about Owen Taylor, one of our main technical evangelists. We got this from Atif Aziz, one of the organizers of the Swiss .Net Microsoft User Group (published with Atif's permission):

 

I just wanted to drop some feedback about Owen's presentation to the user group. Frankly, I am not exaggerating the slightest by saying the attendees (myself included) were completely blown away. I am really grateful that he put all his passion and enthusiasm in delivering the talk (even after such a long flight), which went to demonstrate his own conviction of the subject matter and consequently made the audience more receptive to newer ideas. Owen is a rare gem in that he possesses some very unique and exceptional presentation and story-telling skills. He took a subject that was fairly new to the audience and delivered it very effectively, building momentum as he went along. He presented the problem space in its historical context and then slowly moved over to the solution without missing any of the essences along the way.

I would end there, but I think the attendees were even more amazed when he managed address all of the technical concerns and queries that were brought up during and afterwards. Really, I know something changed in that room that day. :)

Here are the exact words of one of the attendees that I received by e-mail the following day. “I just wanted to thank you for bringing this "inspiring" and "delicious-food-for-thought" talk to the community. It was great and I enjoyed it a lot. thanks again”

Owen tirelessly travels the globe, spreading the word about Space-Based Architecture, GigaSpaces, Jini/JavaSpaces and all things distributed computing.

Besides his own excellent blog, Owen's been featured multiple times on TheServerSide.com and other sites, sharing his deep technical knowledge. But what really sets Owen apart is that he is a natural born performer. He was a performer on Broadway for many years and that combined with his tech knowledge and passion -- well, it's dynamite.

To check out Owen in an event or Java/.Net user group near you, go tour Upcoming Events. To see how Owen has been tirelessly spanning the globe, see our Previous Events...

Excuse My French

Marc Fleury is funny. Must be fun to have FU money.

Developer-Friendliness: Wiki Documentation

Laurel Anderson of Atlassian wrote this post on the Atlassian blog regarding the case study they just published on how GigaSpaces is using Confluence as a wiki for online documentation. The Atlassian guys were quite excited about this, as corporate wikis are typically used as internal collaborative tools (we use Confluence for that as well) -- not for external documentation and communication.

Why use a wiki you ask? It's not like we're letting non-GigaSpacers edit the thing. The value of the wiki here is still from it being an internal collaborative tool. It is a platform for very dynamic collaboration on our online documentation. The extra bonus is that using the same platform we can then publish the end result of that collaboration to the rest of the world.

The benefit to developers who are users of GigaSpaces is that they have a continuously updated and enriched documentation that is constantly fed by all of the relevant knowledge-holders in our development and product management teams.

Here's the full case study and interview with Gilad Maayan, award-winning technical writer at GigaSpaces.

Grid Meets the Middle Office

Found this City#Grid Special Report via Matt Davey's blog. Lots of interesting real-world cases on how banks are using grids of all sorts. Not surprisingly, I especially liked the piece on page 12 in which Andy Doddington from Bank of America describes how they used GigaSpaces to scale and simplify a middle office applications for P&L analytics.

One the interesting things Andy raises is a very common thing on Wall Street, which is the extensive use of Microsoft Excel among middle and front office users (traders, quants, etc.) in investment banks. Whatever you think of it, Excel is the de facto standard front-end for many-many apps in the securities industry.

While it is a flexible tool, and one that many users are familiar and comfortable with, it also creates many difficulties from an enterprise point-of-view around management, maintenance, disjointed data silos, etc.

In this particular case the solution was to use the GigaSpaces in-memory data grid and replace the client (Excel) with a rich client. That works. But one of the things we are working on with Microsoft is how to have the best of both worlds: the low-latency and central synchronized data grid with the familiar Excel.

I can't spill the beans just yet, but we'll be announcing and demoing what we've been up to together with Microsoft at the SIFMA show (formerly known as the SIA show) in June in New York.

Come see us there!

JavaOne

Off to Moscone Center for JavaOne. Come see us at the GigaSpaces booth #620. We'll have some of our stars there, including Owen Taylor and Guy Korland.

See you there!