Appistry Opens Up for Developers

Appistry has launched an extensive new initiative that provides free access to its grid-based application platform and opens the door for more developers to try the company's software.

With its new free download program, St. Louis-based Appistry introduces a new product, Appistry EAF Community Edition, an Open Distribution licensing model, and the company’s new Peer2Peer developer portal, company officials said.

The new Appistry EAF Community Edition is a free product based on the Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF). And like Appistry EAF, the Community Edition enables developers and architects to more efficiently build highly scalable distributed applications and deploy them using the latest grid-based technology. With Appistry EAF Community Edition, enterprises can quickly begin building applications in Java, Spring, .NET or C/C++ for extreme transaction processing (XTP), software-as-a-service (SAAS), cloud computing, and other data- and CPU-intensive applications, the company said.

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Getting grid-enabled application fabric into the hands of developers in midmarket or smaller organizations is one reason behind the open-distribution program, said Sam Charrington, vice president of Product Management and Marketing.

"A FedEx [-sized customer] may work with us to build an application that runs on hundreds of servers, but midmarket organizations have more modest requirements,” Charrington said. “But they still need agility, still need to keep up with changing market demands," he said.

Moreover, these users can "have access to the same product the big boys have access to, but with no investment—it’s free,” Charrington said. “This is not trialware we’re talking about, it’s for development. They can use it for production, they can build applications on it and they can build as many applications as they want, for free."

Of course, getting its software into the hands of smaller organizations also gives Appistry the potential for upselling as those SMBs grow. "We feel that this allows us to seed what’s a rapidly growing market," Charrington said, referring to SAAS.

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"The technology is blooming as IT trends are taking hold,” he said. “These are trends that affect not just the Fortune 100 but SMBs as well. SAAS is touching all of us, and those companies want to be well-positioned to take advantage of them. By giving them tools that allow them to position themselves, over time we feel that a portion of them may come to us because they want additional support, and we can provide them with commercial-grade support."

Appistry has, in fact, worked with organizations that have fewer than 10 employees, including DreamType, a startup that markets a one-to-one personalized e-marketing service that has potential to go SAAS, said Kevin Haar, CEO of Appistry.

Providing free software to such companies can give them an opportunity to freely build an application that will scale over time until small companies get to the point where they grow beyond a handful of processors and cores, or get to the point where they want more for their customers, or simply just want to build on more and more applications within the fabric, Haar said.

"Small customers, a lot of times they’re customers that have built an interesting application that runs on a desktop, and they want to scale out for a little bit of an enterprise solution or to become a SAAS company or to offer other services over the Internet for their customers,” Haar said. “We provide an easy way to scale without having to hire expertise for that," he said.

Under the Open Distribution program, Appistry EAF Community Edition may be downloaded for free and used on up to 5 servers or 10 CPU cores. Unlike trial software, the license to use EAF Community Edition does not expire. And Appistry officials said enterprises may use the EAF Community Edition for production deployment of applications, as well as for development and testing purposes.

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"We create a world where customers can make a multitude of applications run on a commodity framework with reliability," Haar said. The open-distribution initiative "was a great way to take an open distribution program and give people the ability to use our product, to architect, to develop and to deploy with our applications and to get transparent scale and reliability, and then begin to pay us a fee when they start to get economic benefit out of those applications."

Meanwhile, Appistry Peer2Peer is a comprehensive Web portal for developers and architects building scalable applications with Appistry products, Charrington said. Peer2Peer community members have access to a variety of resources including product downloads, documentation wiki, community-based support, and community forums.

In addition, community members can engage with Appistry product specialists, share code samples and examples, subscribe to RSS feeds, and other portal-based services.

eWEEK Midmarket Editor Lisa Vaas contributed to this article.