Time flies when you're having fun.
It's already been two weeks since our London customer conference. I was trying to get around to write a summary of the event but didn’t get a chance, as things have been so busy at GigaSpaces these days. Its good that I have to travel sometimes (SpringOne, in this particular case – more on that on another post), so I get some time to do it on the plane...
AS I wrote this, it became quite lengthy so I chopped it up into several posts. Below is Part 1:
The GigaSpaces European Customer Conference was extremely successful – with more than 100 attendees. It was a great opportunity to meet great long-time supporters, such as Julian Browne, WiIliam Todd, Andy Doddington, Baruch Chasid, Alejandro Ramallo, as well as Phil, Steve and John from PSJ Solutions (I’m sure I missed a few – please forgive me). All have been quite influential on our product roadmap and technology direction.
The event started with a visionary talk from Yaron Benvenisti,our CEO, who discussed some of the company stats and industry trends. Yaron described in a very clear and precise way, as he always does, the convergence of SOA, EDA, Compute Grids and Data Grids. He described why this leads to a new era in middleware, in which GigaSpaces and its customers are playing a major role in shaping and driving the next generation middleware stack.
He presented the hyper-growth we've been experiencing over the past few years (nearly 300% in 2006), dozens of customers in production, and more than 100 employees in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, India and Asia-Pacific. I must admit that even I was a bit impressed (we’re running at such a speed that I don't even have the time to take a step back and look at all these great achievements from time to time).
Yaron’s session was followed by a session from Koen Van den Brande, CTO of Microsoft Financial Services in EMEA, who gave a joint presentation with Dekel Tankel, GigaSpaces Director of Technical Alliances. Dekel demonstrated our new joint solution with Microsoft, addressing common scaling requirements around the use of Excel for analytical applications in the financial industry. Dekel showed a cool demo of how you can drive real-time market data feeds into Excel and address major scalability issues, such as the amount of data that can be loaded, the way data is distributed and shared among the traders, and how traders can share common business logic.
More about this solution here, and Geva Perry discusses it here.
Next up: Andy Doddington, who was definitely one of the stars of the show – the brilliant cynic at his best. In this specific case he had good reason: he actually solved many of the above Excel issues a while ago and took a different approach using eclipse RDB as the rich client framework, which entirely focuses on addressing analytical applications.
You can find more details about this project in one of my recent posts on the GigaSpaces Blog: Excel that Scales: Grid Meets the Middle Office.
It was interesting to hear how they started their project loading relatively small data-sets, and were able to triple the load over less then a year without any change to their application code, just by adding more GigaSpaces instances.
Andy also talked about the work that our development team has been doing together with his group at BofA and with Interface21. This three-way cooperation was a major influence on our 6.0 product roadmap and Spring integration strategy. It was nice to hear that BofA has several applications in production for a while using the GigaSpaces-Spring approach and they are looking for extending it to more applications. I would like to use this opportunity and personally thank everyone on the BofA team who is working on this project: Yuri in particular, as well as the teams in NY and Chicago, who are already running about two dozen GigaSpaces applications within different parts of the bank, all that in a period of slightly more than a year! They have been a very collaborative partner, something that I aspire to have with other customers around the globe.
That's it for Part I. More on the GigaSpaces European Customer Conference in Part II.
