Terracotta, Inc.

Terracotta, Inc.
Industry	Computer Software
Founded	San Francisco, California, 2003
Products	BigMemory Enterprise Ehcache Quartz Scheduler Web Sessions Terracotta Enterprise Suite In-Genius
Number of employees	50-100
Parent	Software AG
Website	www.terracotta.org

Terracotta, Inc. is a computer software company that specializes in increasing scalability, availability, and performance of real-time Big Data applications. The company's flagship product is BigMemory, an in-memory data management suite. Terracotta software is used in 190 countries on 500,000+ deployments by more than one million developers. The company is owned by Software AG.

History

Terracotta began as a provider of clustering technologies for Java intended to simplify development, deployment, testing and management of enterprise applications by moving clustering and caching services to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) instead of the application.

In August 2009, Terracotta purchased Ehcache. The company expanded the capabilities of Ehcache and developed enterprise-class products based on the open source project.^[1] That year, Terracotta also acquired Quartz, the de facto standard job scheduler for Java.

Software AG acquired Terracotta in May 2011. Wolfram Jost, CTO of Software AG, cited Terracotta’s scalability, performance, cloud enablement and in-memory strategy as the most critical factors for the acquisition.^[2]

Terracotta is the in-memory technology in the Software AG product stack. Additionally, its in-memory processing provides the foundation for Software AG’s cloud offerings.^[3]

Products and Projects

BigMemory: a commercial in-memory data management suite for real-time Big Data applications that stores up to hundreds of terabytes in distributed memory across multiple servers without performance hits from the Java garbage collector
Ehcache: an open source, standards-based cache used to boost performance, offload the database and simplify scalability^[4]

Enterprise Ehcache: a commercial product based on the open source Ehcache project

Quartz: an open source job scheduling service

Quartz Scheduler: a commercial product, based on the open source Quartz project

Web Sessions: a commercial product that provides high availability for Java Servlet Sessions, allowing user session data to survive server restarts and failures^[5]
Terracotta Enterprise Suite: a commercial product that includes BigMemory, Web Sessions and Quartz Scheduler
In-Genius: a native, in-memory platform for real-time insight and intelligent action on Big Data. General availability is planned for the third quarter of calendar 2013

Community

In addition to selling commercial solutions, Terracotta leads several open source projects, including Ehcache, with source code available for anonymous access on Subversion. The software produced by these projects is used by an active community of over one million developers across 190 countries on 2.5 million deployments. Terracotta provides a number of resources to facilitate communication amongst these users:^[6]

Forums: free discussion boards where users can post questions as they integrate Terracotta with their application
Email lists: special interest email groups
Jira BugTracker: an issue and feature tracking application where users can post issues or feature requests and see a work schedule for the development community

Awards

DataWeek's 2012 Big Data Technology Top Innovator Award^[7]

References