GigaSpaces Spins Off Cloudify, Its Open Source Cloud Orchestration Unit

GigaSpaces Technologies announced today that its business unit for Cloudify, the open source orchestration and cloud management platform, will be spun off into a new company focused on its core markets — cloud and telecoms. GigaSpaces’ core product is its in-memory computing platform XAP. It also sells an in-memory analytics solution called InsightEdge.

“It was always our plan to eventually spin off Cloudify,” said Nati Shalom, Cloudify’s CTO, in a statement. “Based on the impressive growth of the open-source Cloudify project, and increased market penetration of the commercially supported Cloudify product, it has become clear that now is the time to do so. This strategic move gives us the freedom to accelerate engineering development in both product lines.”

The new company will retain Cloudify’s core engineering, product, and marketing teams, who will work from existing offices in New York City, San Jose, and Tel Aviv.

Cloudify is a framework used to deploy, manage, and scale applications in the cloud first released by GigaSpaces in 2012. It ships with built-in support for private clouds, such as OpenStack and VMware, as well as public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. In addition, it supports container technologies, such as Kubernetes, and configuration management tools, including Chef, Puppet, and Ansible.

The platform is also used increasingly by large telecoms and carriers to manage network functions virtualization, and markets a separate Cloudify Telecom Edition.

In 2016, Cloudify launched Project ARIA, an open source orchestration library, to accelerate adoption of the open source cloud computing language TOSCA. Although it has contributed the project to the Apache Foundation, it continues to be part of the company’s strategy to leverage open source software.

In the announcement of the spin-off, GigaSpaces said this action has been in the works since last year and was driven by Cloudify’s success in both the cloud and the carrier network orchestration markets. “It allows the new Cloudify entity to dedicate engineering, product development, marketing and customer support activities to the cloud market segment.”

“GigaSpaces, with its long-standing track record in the in-memory computing market, will continue to capitalize on its technology investments and innovation in its XAP and InsightEdge product lines,” the company said in a statement.

While the XAP/InsightEdge and Cloudify businesses are already functioning as separate business units, the structural spin-off is still subject to regulatory approval.