More and more data management vendors are open-sourcing their software. DataTorrent Inc. released the code for its stream processing engine last year, Splice Machine Inc. did the same with its Hadoop-based relational store this June and now GigaSpaces Technologies Inc. is joining the club as well. The company this morning announced plans to make the core component of its XAP in-memory computing framework available under a free license.

Though the system is not as well-known as SAP SA’s HANA in-memory store or Apache Spark, it’s achieved tremendous success since hitting the market 15 years ago. GigaSpaces claims that XAP is used by hundreds of Fortune 500 companies including IBM Corp. and Morgan Stanley to power data-intensive applications that require the ability to operate at peak performance with minimal latency. Some customers are running conventional analytics software like Hadoop, while others are using the outfit’s software to process patient records and other sensitive information.

GigaSpaces hopes that open-sourcing the core capabilities of XAP will broaden its appeal even further. The vendor’s reasoning is fairly straightforward: The cheaper it is to try out the software, the more companies will do so and the bigger the  sales funnel becomes. Releasing the code for the framework the added benefit of reaffirming its position in the analytics ecosystem, which has changed considerably over last 15 years. Hadoop, MongoDB and other community-backed projects now dominate the industry agenda while traditional proprietary vendors are scrambling to catch up with the open-source bandwagon.

At the same time, however, organizations are still as willing as ever to pay for value-added functionality. GigaSpaces hopes to address the demand by rolling out two new commercial editions of its offering alongside the open-source version. The first, XAP Premium, provides expanded support for third party products, while the other is called XAP Enterprise and sets itself apart with advanced management features. It allows users to optimize storage capacity, create remote backups and customize the geographic distribution of their records to ensure that they don’t end up somewhere they’re not supposed to. Both commercial versions also come with SLA guarantees and support.

Image via Geralt