Startup companies play the leading role in bringing innovative ideas to market and shape our world, and in some respect, our lives. What used to be entirely under the control of big vendors, who set the tone on where the industry is going, has moved to bright individuals from start-up companies. Much of that happened thanks to the Internet and the progress in the developer community, which significantly reduced the barriers to entry of startups.
Having been a start-up ourselves at GigaSpaces, I appreciate the time-to-market challenge and the complexity involved in developing innovative software. For years, I've been hearing from friends and colleagues in start-ups how much they would have liked to use our technology to address this challenge, but couldn't justify the cost of our software in the initial stages of their new company. Like with many things in life, it was just a matter of time (and timing) until we were able to come up with a program that creates a win/win model for this profile of companies - we call it The GigaSpaces Startup program.
This program enable those who are still in the startup stage to get a full, perpetual license of GigaSpaces for free - no strings attached!
Geva Perry gives more detail about the program in his blog.
Looking at the bigger picture, I feel that we're at the beginning of a new era of complete change in how applications are built. Things like the Amazon EC2 service, and utility or cloud computing in general, and the architectures of today's large-scale web sites (eBay, Amazon, Google...) are a clear indication that this is happening.
Startup should and will play a major role in shaping this world. I therefore see our startup program more than just a tool to increase the adoption of GigaSpaces, but as our contribution to help shaping the next generation middleware stack together with those start-up companies. You can think about it more as a "start-up alliance".
Personally, I'm very excited about this and I'm going to dedicate a major part of my time, together with a group of bright people at GigaSpaces and outside of it, to making this vision come true.
This is definitely not the last word on this topic. There are many things that we have already done in this area and many things that are in the works.
The number of start-ups that have already signed up for the program and the general interest that we're seeing since the launch yesterday, is extremely encouraging.
If any of you have more suggestions/comments on this topic , I'd love to hear them.
