Saturday, March 24, 2007

Cache in the bank - Oracle buys Tangosol

Oracle has picked up Tangosol - and its caching product Coherence - for the traditional undisclosed sum.

Well done Cameron Purdy. For a couple of years I worked at SpiritSoft, and we competed with Tangosol. Our engineers always said we had the better architecture - but Tangosol whipped our ass good anyhow. Cameron's team delivered a robust product and made it easy for people to buy - and the fact that they now claim 1500 implementations is testimony to lots of hard work all round.

We competed around the JCache JSR 107, which must be the slowest JSR to get to a review draft (and ironically, it was originally sponsored by Oracle). This 2002 TSS thread was already talking about excessive delays; since then very little seems to have happened - mind you the JCP (Java Community Process) site is having an off day, so perhaps it came out while I wasn't looking.

Soon after that TSS exchange Cameron joined the JSR 107 expert group, and IIRC he became the spec lead. But still no delivery. Perhaps now Oracle will push the standard some more? Anyway, all that competition is water long under the bridge, so let's recognise a winner, and as Cameron would say:

Peace

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Nigel, thanks for the note :-)

This is certainly an exciting time for us, and there's a lot more to Coherence today than what you may recall from yesteryear. Nowadays, Coherence is running stock exchanges and order systems, all in main memory! Wait until you see what tomorrow brings ;-)

Peace.