Sorry about the mistake in your title. I’ve fixed it in the post.

Truthfully, I think vendors like yourself are in a tough position trying to hone a single marketing message to drive adoption of distributed computing products. There are really two distinct audiences, the CIO and the coder, and they each require divergent messages that their counterpart doesn’t really understand, value, or support.

It’s like trying to sell the government on seatbelt legislation or motorcycle helmet laws. The reasons government may be interested (e.g. control funding of medical care programs, appease insurance lobbyists, manipulate states’ rights) are orthogonal, if not contradictory, to the reasons the populace gets on board (self-preservation, controlling willful teenagers with new drivers licenses, limiting accident liability, controlling car insurance costs). The way the US Government dealt with these issues was to take a paternal, “Daddy Knows Best” stance and enact the legislation over the cries of the constituency. That seems to be what the financial community is doing as well. Of course, if it worked for Big Government, it could work for Big Finance too.

Marc thanks for the kind words.

For accuracy my role is CTO and Founder not CEO, Our CEO is Yaron Benvenisti a good colleague and a friend. Believe me, the last thing I want is to get into his shoes :)

Back to the developers view, I was actually very surprised to see how far the industry is lagging behind in understanding the criticality of that issue to the mass adoption of grid architecture. After years of experience with grid I still heard that the way to scale your application is to make it stateless, on the other hand people including those on the panel said that they do want to bring the business critical applications such as front-office applications into the grid. Obviously there is an implicit contradiction in that statement, those application are stateful by nature therefore you can’t scale them by making them stateless!. It is also clear that to build an application that will utilize the grid effectively it would require awareness of the application and the developers on how to write such application on a grid, for example: how do you partition the data, how do you route the transactions to node that contains that data?. How do you handle a scenario in which the resource that you depend on is not available but may become available at a later stage?. How can you verify that your application will behave correctly in a grid in your development environment?. These are only few of the things that needs to be addressed and cannot be avoided. The developer role is therefore critical since he is the one responsible for dealing with those issues.
Creating a development environment that will simplify how you deal with all this tradeoffs will also have a direct impact on how much we can utilize our existing investment in the grid and how reliable those application will become on that environment. So rather then spending millions of dollars on building a bigger grid we need to make sure first that we can make the best out of the existing one. I’m hoping that with the work that were doing with some of the grid vendors we will be able to address that sooner rather then later.

Nati S.
GigaSpaces
Write Once Scale Anywhere