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May 22, 2011

Terracotta Joins Software AG

posted by ari

Hello all,

I wanted to send a personal note thanking everyone in and around the Terracotta community for their years of hard work and dedication to our technology. Without you, there would be no Terracotta. I also wanted to give you a reasonably detailed preview of where we are headed as part of Software AG going forward.

As you have likely heard, Software AG has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Terracotta. You are probably asking what this means for you and the open source community, what this means for customers, and what this means for the Java industry as a whole. While I do not have a crystal ball, I can speak to why Software AG and Terracotta joined forces and explain our vision for a bright future for both our users and Java.

First, if you are a community member, and have faithfully been using or just contemplating using any of our technology – from Ehcache, to Quartz, to Terracotta Server Arrays – rest assured, it gets better from here. We intend to continue our strategic investments in open source technology focused on improving performance and scale for your applications. We will continue to host the same web sites, services, and domains you are used to, and in fact will soon be increasing our efforts to make the community sites easier to use. Everything will continue as planned – or faster – on the open source front.

Second, if you are a customer, you will soon enjoy a much higher level of coverage from and access to the Terracotta team. With Software AG’s worldwide scale brought to bear, we can offer more onsite services, more support, and more guidance than ever before. Software AG’s revenues are above €1.1 billion per year. The company has over 3,000 services engineers worldwide, offices in 70 countries, and generally more resources for customers than Terracotta could provide in the near future at our current scale. That said, those resources are as high quality as you have come to expect from Terracotta. As a customer you will see all the power of Terracotta that you are used to on the product front, all the power of Software AG’s organization on the services and support front, and more rapid innovation to boot.

Third, and most critically, is what this means for the Java community at-large. Where are Software AG and Terracotta taking our technologies, products, and solutions in the future? One of our first stops on the product roadmap will be to integrate Terracotta’s family of solutions, including Ehcache, BigMemory, and Quartz Scheduler, with Software AG’s existing solutions. The good news for Software AG’s customers is that Terracotta’s snap-in performance and scale works equally well with packaged software such as WebMethods—enabling WebMethods customers to scale up with BigMemory and scale out with Ehcache—as it does for the direct integrations that many of our customers have done to-date. Software AG and Terracotta intend to bring a whole new level of cost-effective, massive scale to existing products in the portfolio.

We also intend to deliver more features faster for the Terracotta user community. Working to solve customer problems at Software AG’s scale will help us achieve another level of simplicity and performance. Our goal is to deliver petabyte-scale solutions.

And there’s another important benefit for customers from this acquisition: a better cloud. In addition to enhancing Software AG’s already-great products and accelerating Terracotta’s roadmap that much faster with more resources and more concentrated feedback, we also intend to embark on a new vision and strategy for cloud-enabled applications. Call it a stack, a platform, a service, or whatever you like. But rest assured, the enterprise application development community – whether you work in Java, .Net, or C++ – will soon have a powerful and exciting new option for building applications in the cloud. This new option will include the most scalable, widely used in-memory data store on the market today, Ehcache with BigMemory coupled to Terracotta Server Arrays. And it will be standards-based and open, to work with most application servers, development frameworks, and data stores. In fact, we plan to make it the most open platform on the market, with interoperability as a core value proposition.

I think this is a great time for Java. Lots of innovation is happening in data management technology as well as in operational runtime environments. Together, Software AG and Terracotta intend to take your app from local-only simple caching, to distributed in-memory solutions, and all the way to datacenter-wide or cloud-scale deployments on the order of petabytes. This cloud vision encompasses all Software AG’s products and Terracotta’s products far into the future.

Thank you so much for your support, your contributions, and your loyalty. I look forward to continuing to work with all of you, and I am especially excited to have your support for our newly united efforts as we go to that next level.
Onward and upward!

--Ari

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Comments

Posted by: Richard Ladson at May 23, 2011 2:02 AM

Posted by: Peter Lin at May 23, 2011 5:05 AM

Posted by: SriSatish at May 23, 2011 3:08 PM

Posted by: Simon Shelston at May 23, 2011 5:28 PM