Software AG acquires open source caching experts Terracotta

Terracotta, home of open source projects such as the Ehcache Java cache and Quartz scheduler, has been acquired by Software AG. The acquisition will, says the German company, act as a foundation for its in-memory and cloud offerings, allowing it to run business processes which use in-memory cached data access at "up to a thousand times faster than database access"; it expects to offer the first combined products in the fourth quarter of 2011.

The acquisition is Software AG's first significant open source business acquisition and the company's CTO, Wolfram Jost, assured existing Ehcache users that "Software AG is also committed to fully supporting Terracotta's open source communities in further developing this next generation in-memory technology". The assurance was backed up by Amit Pandey, CEO of Terracotta, who said that both companies are committed to investing in and "preserving the vibrant open source communities of Ehcache and Quartz". Terracotta's CTO, Ari Zilka said in a blog posting that "everything will continue as planned – or faster – on the open source front" as Software AG's investment would allow the company to scale. Ehcache creator Greg Luck said, in his personal blog, that he was staying with Terracotta and was currently focusing on standardising Java caching by leading the specification of JSR107.

Terracotta was created in 2003 to offer commercially licensed open source software based around the Terracotta platform. In 2009 it hired the developer of Ehcache, Greg Luck, and took over the intellectual property of the project; it later released a commercial Enterprise Ehcache product. In the same year, it also acquired the Quartz enterprise job scheduler. The company's focus then shifted to these new acquisitions and to enhancing them with new products; for example, it recently announced Quartz Scheduler 2.0 and introduced Quartz Manager monitoring and Quartz Where distributed control. Software AG is an enterprise software company which was founded in 1969. In 2010 it had a €1.1 billion revenue from its business process management and infrastructure products and services. The companies expect the deal to be completed by June 2011.

(djwm)