Terracotta, Inc. is a computer software company that specializes in increasing scalability, availability, and performance of real-time Big Data applications. The company's flagship product is Terracotta DB, an in-memory distributed data management platform which provides persistent storage, caching and compute capabilities. Terracotta is used in 190 countries by over two million developers and has more than 2.5 million deployments. The company is owned by Software AG.
History
Terracotta began as a provider of clustering technologies for Java intended to simplify development, deployment, testing and management of enterprise applications by moving clustering and caching services to the Java Virtual Machine instead of the application. In August 2009, Terracotta purchased Ehcache. The company expanded the capabilities of Ehcache and developed enterprise-class products based on the open source project. That year, Terracotta also acquired Quartz, the de facto standard job scheduler for Java. Software AG acquired Terracotta in May 2011. Wolfram Jost, CTO of Software AG, cited Terracotta's scalability, performance, cloud enablement and in-memory strategy as the most critical factors for the acquisition. In November 2017, Terracotta DB was launched, a in-memory data management platform for translytical workloads, based on an evolution of Terracotta BigMemory. Terracotta DB adds persistent store and compute capabilities as well as claiming 300% better performance on caching compared to previous releases. Terracotta is the in-memory technology in the Software AG product stack. Additionally, its in-memory processing provides the foundation for Software AG's cloud offerings.
Products and projects
BigMemory: a commercial in-memory data management suite for real-time Big Data applications that stores up to hundreds of terabytes in distributed memory across multiple servers without performance hits from the Java garbage collector
Ehcache: an open source, standards-based cache used to boost performance, offload the database and simplify scalability
Quartz: an open source job scheduling service
Web Sessions: a commercial product that provides high availability for Java Servlet Sessions, allowing user session data to survive server restarts and failures
Terracotta Enterprise Suite: a commercial product that includes BigMemory, Web Sessions and Quartz Scheduler
In-Genius: a native, in-memory platform for real-time insight and intelligent action on Big Data. General availability is planned for the third quarter of calendar 2013
Community
In addition to selling commercial solutions, Terracotta leads several open source projects, including Ehcache, with source code available for anonymous access on Subversion. The software produced by these projects is used by an active community of over one million developers across 190 countries on 2.5 million deployments. Terracotta provides a number of resources to facilitate communication amongst these users:
Forums: free discussion boards where users can post questions as they integrate Terracotta with their application
Email lists: special interest email groups
Jira BugTracker: an issue and feature tracking application where users can post issues or feature requests and see a work schedule for the development community
Community home page for Terracotta, a place to get the latest tips and tricks, and connect with other like-minded developers
