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GigaSpaces Update Appeals To Mainstream Developers: Page 2 of 2

The new functionality is significant, but the main challenge for XAP is adoption from system integrators, ISVs, cloud service providers and SaaS vendors, which may not be willing to adopt technology from a relatively small vendor like GigaSpaces, says Pezzini. According to the 10-year-old company, it has only 350 customers globally.

Pezzini thinks the key for XAP adoption could be Memcached support, something the other vendors don't provide. "This is an extremely popular open-source distributed caching platform--as an example, Facebook is a massive user of this technology. By supporting the Memcached APIs, GigaSpaces has now a powerful tool to up-sell to the Memcached installed base."

Another factor is that large software vendors (such as Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and VMware/SpringSource) see these technologies as key enablers for a variety of other strategies, such as BPM, ESB, application servers and cloud. XAP has been utilized primarily by financial services companies, especially to support trading types of applications, but the last three years have seen growing adoption in verticals such as Web commerce, online gaming and cloud/SaaS, as well as in commercial banking and other segments to support application scenarios such as mainframe offloading.

"This growing adoption, including increasingly by mainstream enterprises, is calling for a standardization. Although there is no credible standardization industry effort taking place, APIs like JPA, Memchached, Ehcache are rapidly emerging as de facto standards for DCPs [distributed caching platforms or memory data grids]", said Pezzini.

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