In summing up the business side of GridGain for last year (compared with the community side that I usually blog about), the company continued strong momentum throughout 2018. Let's take a closer look.
Key achievements during the year included 200 percent year-over-year growth in new customers, numerous industry honors, key product and service innovations and increasing popularity of the In-Memory Computing Summit. Taken as a whole, this success reflects GridGain’s continued industry leadership.
GridGain, as you probably know, is a provider of enterprise-grade in-memory computing solutions based on Apache® Ignite™. GridGain is the most comprehensive in-memory computing platform for high-volume ACID transactions, real-time analytics, web-scale applications, continuous learning and HTAP. Here's 2018 in review:
Growth
- New customers signed in 2018 tripled compared to 2017, driven by leading companies in industries including financial services, fintech, e-commerce, retail, online travel services, web-scale online business services, telecommunications, transportation and healthcare.
- Annual Recurring Revenues increased 113 percent year-over-year driven by new customer sales as well as growth within existing customer accounts worldwide.
- GridGain expanded its global presence in Western Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific regions. GridGain also expanded its executive team, adding Tim Carley as Managing Director, EMEA, and Lalit Ahuja as Vice President Professional Services.
Awards
- Named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list, coming in at #77 with 1,724 percent growth over the past four years.
- Named to the 2018 Inc. 5000 list, coming in at #158, up from #187 last year. The company was ranked 17th among software companies, 13th in the San Francisco metro area, and 37th in California with 2,677 percent growth over the past three years
- Named to the 2018 Red Herring Top 100 Global Winners list for the third consecutive year.
- Named to the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s Fast Private 2018 list, coming in at #2 with 681.8 percent growth from 2015 to 2017.
- Named to the San Francisco Business Times list of the Bay Area’s 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies 2018, coming in at #5 based on revenue growth from 2015 to 2017.
- Received Bronze Stevie Awards in the categories Company of the Year - Computer Software – Medium and New Product or Service of the Year – Software – Other for the GridGain In-Memory Computing Platform.
- Included in the Database Trends & Applications (DBTA) annual DBTA 100 list of the Companies That Matter Most in Data and in the DBTA annual list of Trend Setting Products.
- Included on The insideBIGDATA IMPACT 50 List for Q2 2018.
- GridGain’s Vice President of Marketing Terry Erisman took the Bronze award for Marketing Executive of the Year in the 2018 PR World Awards.
- GridGain’s Sr. Director of Product Marketing Alisa Baum was named to Marketo’s first Fearless 50, a list of marketers who are boldly pushing the envelope with new technologies and innovative, creative ways to engage customers.
- Received a Bronze Golden Bridge Award in the New Products & Services - Information Technology Software category for GridGain Enterprise Edition 8.5.
- Named to The Silicon Review - 50 Most Valuable Brands of the Year 2018.
Products and Services
- GridGain Professional Edition 2.7 introduced TensorFlow™ integration for enhanced training of deep learning (DL) models. The latest edition also provides enhanced usability, including expanded support for thin clients and transparent data encryption at rest to improve security. Together, the features make it easier to use the GridGain In-Memory Computing Platform for more use cases, such as for achieving the speed and scalability required for implementing real-time continuous learning for digital transformation and omnichannel customer experience initiatives.
- Earlier in the year, GridGain delivered GridGain Professional Edition 2.4, which included a Continuous Learning Framework with machine learning and multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network features. These features enable companies to run machine learning and deep learning algorithms against their petabyte-scale operational datasets in real-time. GridGain Professional Edition 2.4 also enhanced the performance of Apache® Spark™ by introducing an API for Apache Spark DataFrames, adding to the existing support for Spark RDDs.
- GridGain released a beta version of GridGain Cloud, the only in-memory cache-as-a-service that allows users to rapidly deploy a distributed in-memory cache and access it using ANSI-99 SQL, key-value or REST APIs. The result is in-memory computing performance in the cloud, which can be massively scaled out and can be deployed in minutes for caching applications.
- GridGain made its In-Memory Computing Platform available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace and certified the GridGain In-Memory Computing Platform is now fully compatible with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The availability of GridGain in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace provides the highest level of assurance that customers can deploy GridGain on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure without any compatibility challenges. GridGain can also be deployed on-premises, on any other public or private cloud, or on hybrid environments.
- The GridGain Connector for Apache Kafka® was verified by Confluent. The connector is available in the GridGain Enterprise and Ultimate Editions and provides native integration between GridGain and Kafka, making it simpler for GridGain users to leverage the streaming data capabilities of Kafka to create high performance systems that can ingest, process and analyze massive amounts of data at in-memory speeds with massive scalability using GridGain’s in-memory computing platform.
In-Memory Computing Thought Leadership
- The second annual In-Memory Computing Summit® Europe took place in June of 2018 at the Park Plaza Victoria London. More than 300 attendees representing 190 organizations from 22 countries on four continents heard keynotes and breakout sessions on a broad range of in-memory computing topics. Presenters included representatives from 451 Research, CG Consultancy, FSB Technology, ScaleOut Software, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), GridGain Systems and more.
- The fourth annual In-Memory Computing Summit® North America took place in October of 2018 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport. With nearly 450 registrants, the conference included keynotes and breakout sessions by representatives from American Airlines, ING Belgium, Intel Corp., Oracle, Salesforce.com, Huawei, SNIA, Wellington Management, GridGain Systems and more.
- GridGain announced the Call for Papers for the third annual In-Memory Computing Summit Europe, taking place June 3-4, 2019 at the Park Plaza Victoria London. The Call for Papers will end on February 10, 2019.
- GridGain continued its global effort to help businesses understand how in-memory computing addresses the speed and scale requirements of modern, data-intensive applications. The company participated in dozens of industry conferences, hosted over 30 webinars and workshops, and organized or provided speakers for more than 100 meetups around the world.