Terracotta Cuts Path Into Wall Street Clusters

NEW YORK—Terracotta is making inroads in the Wall Street community with its Terracotta clustering solutions for Tomcat and vendor officials expect the first production of Terracotta's giant clusters in a bank by the third quarter of this year.

Last year, Terracotta unveiled an upgrade of its clustering software and a free, Web-based solution that will help user firms cluster their infrastructures in approximately 30 minutes. Included in that updated round of offerings is Terracotta Sessions for Tomcat, which provides free, drop-in clustering for the Apache Tomcat application server.

Terracotta is targeting Apache Tomcat because it was reported by IT market research firm Forrester Research as being the most widely used source servlet engine (DWT, May 15, 2006).

Major Wall Street firms have been conducting labs and tests with Terracotta for the middle office and have purchased applications for the front office, says Ari Zilka, founder and CEO of Terracotta.

"They're very interested because it's lighter weight for them," Zilka says. "They realize this is fledging territory."

Four investment firms are already on board testing the solution for the mid-office, Zilka says, though he declines to name them.

"We thought they would come with or without open source, but we talked to all these managing directors and they were very excited about the fact that we were going open source," Zilka says. "We suspect that by the third quarter there will be the first big production of Terracotta giant clusters in a bank."

Terracotta turned to open source in December 2006.

The Terracotta and Tomcat combination affects Wall Street "from top to bottom," Zilka says. "Between the front end and the middle office is where we impact. In the front end, all these Web applications can move instantaneously from Web Logic to Terracotta and they can do it overnight."

The idea is to get low-cost scaling instead of paying a company or consultant to do it, Zilka says. "Then you can hire developers who understand plain old Java and work on serving the business intelligence functioning and then Terracotta will help you run on a thousand machines," he says.

"I was at a clustering symposium in December for Wall Street to come and talk about what they're trying to do with grids, clusters and servers, and what type of software they're using. Analyst firms brought vendors who explicitly deal with this grid concept," Zilka says.

"The feedback from Wall Street was that they want to get together more often and talk," Zilka says. "They all thought they were off on their own doing something new, but they're really doing the same things."

Zilka says that Wall Street "doesn't want vendors in the mix. They would really rather do these clusters in open source, have access to source code and modify it as we see fit."

He acknowledges that the company "has a long way to go, but like the game of blackjack, we're ready to double down."

Last year, Terracotta unveiled a "Spring" version of its application. Spring is a Java application development framework and the Terracotta Spring offering is available for download at the vendor's Web site. Spring provides a component model that is intended as a basis for integration with other products and enterprise solutions, such as Terracotta's transparent clustering (DWT, Oct. 16, 2006).

"Spring is big because it basically lets you use what you need, when you need it," Zilka says.