Wednesday 16 January 2008

Fly BEA

I'm on my way back home from a meeting in Helsinki. While leafing through BA's air magazine during takeoff I've hit the following ancient ad:




It was too funny to see! What's funny is that we were called to see the customer here because they have latency and scalability issues with their current 3 tier architecture, and they've hit the wall in terms of being able to grow their business. And guess what, BEA is their current J2EE container…

Our meeting was great. These guys seem to know exactly where their limitations are, and what they need to do in order to eliminate them. I gave a thorough walk-through of our feature set and demonstrated real cross technology interoperability on top of the space (Plain Java, JMS, Spring Remoting, JDBC, C#, and C++ clients sharing data and logic seamlessly through the space). That is, of course, in addition to usual HA, scalability, and our beautiful OpenSpaces programming model.

It sure looks like an interesting project to get involved in… I can't really name the customer as of now, all I can say is that on top of their mainstream business activities, they also make tires. Knowing who they are, I would have never guessed that they did… Luckily, I had a nice taxi driver, taking me to the airport, who shared this anecdote with me J.

So, similarly to BA, which has shortened the flight time from London to Stockholm by roughly a half by upgrading its fleet (not sure whether changing the name really helped here, but anyhow…), our customers shorten their processing time by upgrading their architecture from their ancient, 3-tier, J2EE architecture to GigaSpaces. GigaSpaces allows you to truly linearly scale your application w/o paying any penalty in latency (we refer to that as the share-nothing and parallel processing approach).

After seeing what we have, these guys don’t want to fly BEA anymore. Do you?

-Guy

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