Thinking Out Cloud

Excel That Scales: The Movie

Back in June of last year I wrote about our partnership with Microsoft and our plans to work together on a solutions for scaling out computations on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Since then Microsoft and us both released joint material (see here on MSDN) and held joint events promoting the solution. The most up-to-date white paper on the solution can be found here.

But now, Owen Taylor produced a screencast that describes the Microsoft-GigaSpaces joint "Excel That Scales" solution, in which he walks you through the problem and the solution.

Listen to the presentation.

Synopsis:
In many organizations -- for example in capital markets and oil & gas exploration -- Excel is used widely for complex computations and analytics. Excel is a flexible tool that many people are familiar with, so over time huge investments have been made in creating complex analytical models in Excel. However, it was never designed to be an enterprise-grade analytical tool. As data volumes are growing, the need to have real-time information is intensifying and the number of users who wish to share the same computational logic and data is increasing, desktop-based Excel spreadsheets could no longer handle the loads. Also, the functions they perform are becoming mission-critical and valuable time and information could be lost in case of failure.

Enter the GigaSpaces solution. It combines the best of both worlds: Excel as the front-end and the power of your data center -- through GigaSpaces as the scale-out, highly-reliable application server - -at the back-end. In other words, the logic and the data are handled server-side with enterprise-grade reliability and performance.

Owen says it better and shows a demo.

OpenSpaces.org on Killer Start-Ups

Cool. OpenSpaces.org, which we officially launch yesterday got a nice review on  KillerStartups.  Vote for us!

Sun-MySQL: Best. Analysis. Ever

From a comment on the Slashdot post on Sun buying MySQL for $1 billion:

Didn't they know they could just download it...?

Via Sandeep Parikh (Twitter @crcsmnky)

GigaSpaces Launches OpenSpaces.Org

Today we are announcing the official launch of OpenSpaces.org, the community web site around GigaSpaces' OpenSpaces Framework -- an open source application development framework that extends Spring to take full advantage of the scalability ad performance provided by running your distributed application on GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP).

Check out the projects already underway.

And how about submitting your own project for a chance to win the $10,000 grand prize of the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge? There are $25,000 in total prizes and special $1,000 prizes for 'early bird' concept submissions by February 13 (just the concept, not code). Code submission deadlines are due by April 2.

Congrats to Alit, Michael, Gilad, Uri and the rest of the team for making OpenSpaces.Org happen.

GigaSpaces - Powering Web 2.0

A couple of months ago, when we launched the GigaSpaces Start-Up Program, Chris Kanaracus of IDG wrote a piece titled GigaSpaces Targets the 'Digg Effect', which was published in InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, NetworkWorld and a couple of other IDG publications.

The title was about the fact that many Web 2.0 companies face a situation where they may encounter a huge traffic increase if, for example, they get Digged or Slashdotted or Endgadgeted or Gizmodoed. GigaSpaces provides a scale-out application platform, that among other things, can address exactly that situation. In other words, if you need to scale, all you have to do is throw in more commodity servers -- no changes to the architecture or code -- and very little configuration changes.

Well, on Friday I received an email that made my day (week? month? year?) -- and made the title of Chris's story a lot more meaningful. Amnon Sarig, CEO of our customer TuneWiki, sent us this (published with permission):

Hi Yaron, Nati, Geva, Victoria,  

Google ‘TuneWiki’.  You’ll see what you helped unleash. Nothing short of changing the way humanity wants their music served  - in two years time, it will be a God given right for consumers to have the lyrics with the music. We planned for 5,000 users in the first week of beta -- we have tens of thousands jumping on us in days.

We are at the moment totally overwhelming the bandwidth allocated for our beta test. We made the mistake of releasing an update after one week of beta test, fixing all the major points the community asked us for. In one week we collected tens of thousands of users – looks like every one of them tried to upgrade at the same time.

Go ahead, write your case study on how your technology and  GridDynamics magic increased our capacity from 5 million streams to 250 million streams per day. Ask me whatever ‘business’ notes you need.

Thank you all for helping us.

Amnon.

First of all, congrats to Amnon and his team. You need to check out what TuneWiki is all about and a good place to start is this Gizmodo review. If you've ever wished you could see the lyrics of a song you're listening to on the fly, look no further.

Second of all, hello?! How fun is it to get this kind of email from a customer? (and equally as fun that the customer allows you to make it public).

One last thing: in his email, Amnon refers to "GridDynamics magic". GridDynamics is a GigaSpaces partner, headed by Victoria Livschitz, that has been doing tremendous work around our product. Check out their web site and the very cool projects they are working on in their blog, including the GigaPult project and the GigaSpaces Maven Archetype. All of these (and another project called Convergence - will explain in a future post) -- as well as projects from other GigaSpaces customers, partners and employees -- will be available on OpenSpaces.org when we officially launch it later this month. In the meantime, you can read up on the various projects here.

Are Developers Growing in Influence?

Are developers and architects becoming more influential in infrastructure software purchase decisions in large organizations?

Back in September, Matt Asay blogged an interview with Laura Merling of Krugle, which makes a search appliance for software code across the enterprise. In the interview Laura said:

The power for decision making and buying has shifted to the developers, architects and midlevel managers. We are in some very large companies and have not once talked to a CIO! Developers have paved the way with their newfound power.

This "newfound power" that Laura speaks of has to do with open source software. More accurately, it has to do with the fact that most open source software is available for *free* download with a production license. So, presumably, the developers don't need permission from anyone higher-up in the organization to use the product, as there is no purchase involved.

The story goes that this is how Linux, JBoss, MySQL -- and more recently -- Spring and Mule, to name a few, have crept into large enterprises. And one day, after some minor disaster, an executive wakes up and says: "Holy crap! this thing is running on hundreds of our servers, we better get some support". Bam! a seven-figure deal is born, and it was the developers who really made the decision two years earlier.

Obviously, developers have always been influencers and evaluators of the software they will eventually use, but what I described above is a very different dynamic. If this is in fact happening in a major way, it has huge implications to how software used by developers should be marketed and sold.

Not surprisingly, it is very difficult to find hard data on this issue (I've searched). So here's a question:

• If you work at a vendor -- open source or not -- are you seeing this trend?
• If you work at a large company -- as a developer or not -- are you seeing this happen?

Would appreciate any thoughts about this.

Update: Some interesting comments about this blog on TheServerSide, and a thorough analysis by Erik Engbrecht.