GigaSpaces announces new product for enterprise PaaS and ISV SaaS enablement

GigaSpaces Technologies announced today the upcoming release of its second-generation cloud-enablement platform, which offers an architecture aimed specifically at enterprise platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and independent software vendor (ISV) software-as-a-service (SaaS) enablement.

The addition of the newest GigaSpaces cloud-enablement platform broadens a growing field of vendors that are bringing to market the picks and shovels of the cloud gold rush. Targeting SaaS ISVs and the PaaS value makes a lot of sense, as this is where the services are being forged that will need to find cloud homes, be them on-premises, public or hybrids.

In the history of IT, no one got fired for helping good apps get built quickly and well, and deployed widely and openly. That goes for both ISVs and for custom enterprise apps. You just don't get to see that value truly delivered too often. But perhaps the transition to cloud and the need for ISVs to be seduced with openness, what GigaSpaces calls "silo free", will allow for new round of choice and productivity.

Expanding on the current GigaSpaces' solutions, the new products are include private and hybrid cloud-based offerings:

• "Silo-free" architecture that is a converged for more application and data environments, enabling improved cross-stack elasticity, multi-tenancy, unified SLA-driven performance, central management and simplifying development and operational processes.
  
  
• User, data and application policy-driven multi-tenancy management from the web tier down to the customer and data object levels. This provides better monitoring through a console that includes views into control, security, and visibility over the multi-tenancy aspects of the application.
  
  
• Built-in DevOps support helps uniformly manage and automate the lifecycle of the application middleware and its resources, reducing operational and development complexity, says GigaSpaces.
  
  
• Out-of-the-box third-party middleware management (e.g. Tomcat, Cassandra, JMS) that helps automate and manage application middleware services during deployment and production.
  
  
• Portability, multi-language and multi-middleware support, along with integration with existing processes and systems for private, public, and hybrid clouds.

Silo-free architecture

The platform has already been integrated with major strategic partners in the cloud arena, says GigaSpaces, with enterprises and SaaS providers using GigaSpaces cloud enablement in such industries as financial services, e-commerce, online gaming, healthcare, business process management, analytics, and telecommunications.

This new product offers a field-proven technology, minimizing the risks associated with migrating to the cloud, making former ‘mission impossibles’ very possible indeed.

In addition, the solution has been integrated with leading cloud-focused technologies with such partners Cisco and Citrix.

The GigaSpaces ISV SaaS and enterprise PaaS enablement platform is scheduled to be released in Q2 2011. All the new cloud-enablement features will be available to existing customers already using GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) solutions for enterprise scaling as easily integrated add-ons.

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Big data consolidation race enters home stretch, as Teradata buys Aster Data

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

By Tony Baer

At this point, probably at least 90 percent or more of analytic systems/data warehouses are easily contained within the SQL-based technologies that are commercially available today. We’ll take that argument a step further: Most enterprise data warehouses are less than 5 terabytes. So why then all the excitement about big data, and why are acquisitions in this field becoming almost a biweekly thing?

To refresh the memory, barely a couple weeks back, HP announced its intention to buy Vertica. And this morning came the news that Teradata is buying the other 89 percent of Aster Data that it doesn’t already own. Given Teradata’s 11 percent stake, the acquisition was hardly a surprise. Maybe what was surprising was the mere $263-million price tag, which Neil Raden wondered facetiously in his tweet, “That seems like a real bargain. I should have bought them myself!!! Or as Forrester’s James Kobielus tweeted, “Essentially, AsterData gives #Teradata the analytic application server (analytics + OLTP) they need to duke it out with Oracle Exadata.” [Disclosure: Aster Data Systems is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The irony is when you talk about big data, for years it was synonymous with one player: Teradata. But as we’ve observed, there’s more data everywhere and there’s cheaper processor, disk, cache, and bandwidth to transport and manage it –- whether you intercept event streams, store it, or federate to it.

Widening vendor ecosystem

In all this, Teradata has found itself part of a widening vendor ecosystem that has responded to its massively parallel technology with new variants in columnar, in memory, solid state, NoSQL, unstructured data, and event stream technology. While Teradata was known for taking traditional historical analytics, and in some cases, operational data stores to extreme scale, others were eking out different aspects of extreme analytics, whether it being real-time or interactive analysis of structured data, parsing of social media sentiment, taking smarter approaches to managing civil infrastructure or homeland security through analysis of sensory data streams, fraud detection, and so on.

Teradata has hardly stood still, having broadened out its product footprint from its classic proprietary hardware to a broad array of form factors that run on commodity platforms, solid state disk, and virtual cloud, and more recently with acquisitions of MySQL appliance Kickfire and marketing analytics provider Aprimo.

Viewed from a market perspective, Teradata’s acquisition marks the home stretch for consolidation of the current crop of analytic database challengers.

Acquisition of Aster Data, probably the best pick of the remaining lot of columnar database challengers, provides Teradata yet another facet of an increasingly well-rounded product portfolio. Going forward, we expect that Teradata will continue its offerings of vertical industry data templates to extend to the columnar world.

Viewed from a market perspective, Teradata’s acquisition marks the home stretch for consolidation of the current crop of analytic database challengers, who are mostly spread in the columnar field. Dell is the last major platform player standing that has yet to make its move.

The currently wave of consolidation hardly spells the end of innovation here, as there is plenty of headroom in the taming of the NoSQL world. And although acquisition of Aster Data overlaps with HP’s Vertica deal, that makes Teradata no less attractive for an HP that seeks to broaden out its enterprise software footprint.

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

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