Sam Charrington, colleague and friend, spent a few days at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration Summit show last week. One of the more interesting things about Gartner shows are the analyst briefings. While there is no single place that can definitively define what's going on in markets as diverse as those in which we participate, these briefings are a good place to take a snapshot of what things look like today.

Besides, the quality airport time always gives you a chance for reflection, a time to ponder where the market has been, where it is today, and where it's going. The weather must've been bad, because Sam came back very reflective!

When We Started

After we'd incubated a bit, had technology in hand and had started making the rounds of prospective investors, one refrain that we heard over and over again could be summarized something like this:

Why bother? Everything about application development has been settled for good. There's no room for any more innovation in application development and deployment.

I personally heard this too many times to count. It was almost like a technology version of the French knights in In Search for the Holy Grail , as in "we already got one of those!" (about a minute or so into this linked video).

While folks like Massimo Pezzini (a Gartner analyst who covers this sort of thing) and a handful of others didn't buy into this line of thinking, they thought we might be talking about a new niche, something out at the edge. Massimo coined the term XTP (extreme transaction processing), and has been building on that theme.

Now

At the summit last week Massimo observed that

By 2012, mounting user need for XTP applications and technology innovation will propel at least one new software vendor into leadership in the application platform market with more than 15% market share in the XTP platform segment.

Cool.

In fact, he recently issued a report entitled The Birth of the Extreme Transaction-Processing Platform: Enabling Service-Oriented Architecture, Events and More. Great report, well worth the read.

The name alone tells the story ... big innovation is here. Sam brought all this back from the summit, and that got me to thinking.

What Happened?

That's a really, really good question. I think there's a number of factors, but two really stick out to me:

• Scale. Most of the status quo architectures just can't keep up with where conditions are driving the enterprise. Call it a fire hose, customer demand, web-scale, or competition - in fact, call it what you like - the simple reality is that in the early days of the third millinea enterprises (both new and old) need their computing infrastructures to scale. Scale really, really well, and do it simply, reliably, and cheap.
• Desire for Simplicity. While a certain amount of complexity may be inevitable, anyone who is deeply involved in writing, deploying, or operating applications today knows that there are just too many moving parts, they're too hard to move and arrange as needed, and they simply don't work well enough. Stuff breaks when it shouldn't, it's hard for enterprises to

I think the desires for these had been forming for some time, but the rise to dominance of such high-profile players as Google, Amazon, and a few others have shown that new rules are possible. That maybe, just maybe it might be possible for an enterprise to conceive of their application and computing infrastructures scaling as needed, working reliably, being simple to operate, and deployable on commodity infrastructure.

While the rise of the whole virtualization industry is a partial answer to the "desire for simplicity", it's not the whole story, not by any means. In fact, it is the inability of the existing players (you know who you are!) to shake the chains that bind them is what has opened the doors for new players.

What's Next?

This is now cold, sober reality. Simple, reliable, easy to operate scale on commodity infrastructure. Here today, in production at serious enterprises, in the core of their operations - where it matters.

I think the next six, 12, 18 months are going to be very exciting times indeed. As Massimo indicates, I too think we are contributing to the birth of a new platform.

While there may be others who eventually make it, we are driving hard to continue earning the trust of our customers, partners, and the community so that we are the first "new software vendor" who takes a "leadership position ... with more than 15% market share".

So that's a reasonable next step, but more is definitely possible. Much more.