"The GigaSpaces XAP software allows programmers to build an application in a way that as demand grows, it can easily be met with zero architecture or code changes. You just throw in another box into your infrastructure and it scales linearly," said Geva Perry, chief marketing officer of GigaSpaces, as the company this month announced the GigaSpaces Start-Up Program - providing qualified companies and individuals with full, free and perpetual use of the company's flagship product, GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP).

"Today's Web 2.0 start-ups need to build applications that can quickly scale without requiring any change to the application architecture or code," said Perry. "The Start-Up Program enables organizations to gain access to the full-unconstrained commercial edition of GigaSpaces XAP without time, functionality or CPU limitations."

Developers, he added, can build linearly scalable applications from day one, with zero upfront dollar investment in infrastructure software. The Start-Up Program enables organizations to gain access to the full-unconstrained commercial edition of GigaSpaces XAP "without time, functionality or CPU limitations," as Perry puts it. 

Perry reminds us that stories abound of start-ups who have suddenly experienced success on the Internet - either on their own Web site or through a platform such as Facebook - and then scramble to re-design their application to handle the growing loads, often after a publicly-humiliating web site crash. GigaSpaces XAP, on the other hand, allows developers to build applications that can quickly and easily scale-out limitlessly across low-cost servers with zero or little code changes, he noted.

Vertical Acuity, an Atlanta, Ga.-based startup has already joined the GigaSpaces Start-Up Program.

"The Gigaspaces Start-Up Program allows Vertical Acuity to prepare, at low cost, for the inevitable complexities of scale and high availability that comes with providing enterprise services," said Brent Walker, chief technology officer, Vertical Acuity. "We fully expect Gigaspaces' industry leading products to enable us to gracefully extend our platform capacity as our client base grows."

Miwok Airways, based in Burlingame, Calif., a startup air-taxi franchisor, is another company that has joined the program.

In early 2008 Miwok will be launching a patent-pending reservations and yield-management platform that allows air travelers to arrange and influence dynamic pricing for on-demand flights in coordination with others via social networking, including with Facebook friends. "We expect our Web traffic and transaction volumes to grow rapidly - especially given the social networking aspect of our service, which is very viral in nature," said Gad Barnea, chief executive officer and founder of Miwok. "Building our application on top of GigaSpaces ensures that we will be able to scale quickly, easily and reliably to meet this demand."

GigaSpaces also has a program, Perry continued, that enables open source companies and projects to integrate their technologies with the GigaSpaces software and distribute the GigaSpaces free Community Edition. Open source products that have integrated under these programs include the Spring Framework, the open source ESB Mule, Java grid product GridGain and the Hibernate project.