ENGINEERING

ActiveGrid (www.activegrid.com) a new commercial open-source software company, today announced that it has received $3M in "Series A" funding from leading venture firms Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Allegis Capital. Mitchell Kertzman, partner with Hummer Winblad, and Jean-Louis Gassee, general partner with Allegis Capital, have joined the board. The funds will be used to pioneer a new class of commercial open-source application server called "Grid Application Server," which is designed to enable transaction grids and to leverage the growing popularity of the open-source web application stack commonly called the LAMP stack, representing Linux, Apache, MySQL, and the PHP, Python, and Perl scripting languages. ActiveGrid Pioneers Grid Application Server The new Grid Application Server from ActiveGrid will, for the first time, enable CIO's to deploy business-critical, mainstream applications across a "transaction grid" of low-cost computers. ActiveGrid represents a fundamental shift from traditional data center architectures, such as J2EE, by enabling transactional applications to be horizontally scaled across a transaction grid of low-cost computers, as contrasted to the traditional approach of scaling vertically on a small cluster of expensive multi-processor machines that must continually connect to backend systems. "Enterprises are experiencing tremendous growth in the Web Service transactions they must process. The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server will enable organizations to dramatically scale transaction processing performance," said Peter Yared, founder and CEO of ActiveGrid. "Our ActiveGrid software technology puts intelligence into the grid by dynamically adapting the aggregate computer and memory resources of the transaction grid to service transactions." To date, grids have been used primarily for research and compute-intensive applications, such as animation rendering and scientific modeling. The value of transaction grids for mainstream business applications has been proven by a few forward-thinking companies like Google and Amazon whose experts have hand-crafted grids for in-house use. Until now, the benefits of grid computing have remained elusive for all but a few such companies. The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server software platform will enable corporate developers to easily create, integrate, deploy, and scale transaction grids within their own organizations. "Enterprises are about to face a wave of exponential growth in machine-to-machine Web Service data transactions that will place significant computing burden on their existing application backends. A growing number of enterprises have discovered the power, productivity, and cost-effectiveness of using the open-source LAMP platform for business applications. When combined with a computing architecture based on grids of commodity computers, the environment should support new levels of scalability and price/performance," said Anne Thomas Manes, Vice President and Research Director at the Burton Group, a leading industry analyst firm. New Era of Transaction Computing in the Enterprise "There is a fundamental shift underway to open-source and commodity-based computing. CIO's are going to use low-cost hardware running standards-based software in the data center. This is similar to the fundamental shift from mainframe to client-server computing that was enabled by technology such as PowerBuilder in the 1980's. Today there is an opportunity for a new development and deployment platform, such as ActiveGrid, to lead the way," said Mitchell Kertzman, partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. "J2EE and .NET applications were never designed with grids in mind. Just as you would never construct a modern building on top of debris from an old building, you should not rely on the existing technology base as a foundation for developing the next generation of enterprise computing. ActiveGrid's technology is a critical foundation for enabling applications to fully utilize the power of the transaction grid," said Jean-Louis Gassée, general partner at Allegis Capital. ActiveGrid Will Join Open-Source Community As a commercial open-source company, ActiveGrid will employ a hybrid licensing model. The ActiveGrid platform will be made available via BSD-style open-source licensing; additional advanced features and support will be available through commercial licensing. This approach will enable rapid adoption and innovation while providing an enterprise-class, fully supported solution for corporate organizations. "As the use of open-source technologies in the enterprise accelerates, organizations are looking for ways to take Linux-based computing to the next level," said Bertrand Matthelie, director of Alliances for MySQL AB. "We are impressed with ActiveGrid's vision of advancing the LAMP computing platform to enable grid computing for mainstream enterprise business applications. We look forward to partnering with them to help make this a reality." Standards Driven to Preserve Enterprise Investment Since ActiveGrid makes use of widely adopted industry standards such as HTML and XML for communication, it can work to increase the scalability of just about any existing business application. As a result, existing legacy application and database investment is protected. ActiveGrid is built to leverage the Linux operating system, LAMP infrastructure and low-cost, x86-based systems. ActiveGrid's technology will incorporate emerging XML standards such as XForms, BPEL, XPath, and XML Schema. ActiveGrid users will be in corporate IT, developing and deploying enterprise-class applications for financial services, retail, and manufacturing and other business-critical functions. ActiveGrid Product Availability ActiveGrid currently has an alpha version available for select corporate customers. In January 2005 an early access version, available via open-source licensing, will be available. The commercially licensed deployment platform will be available in early Q2 2005.