NEW YORK, Dec. 10 -- GigaSpaces Technologies today announced the launch of the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge, which will award $25,000 in prizes to developers who build the most unique and innovative applications or plug-ins for the OpenSpaces Framework. OpenSpaces is an open source development solution for building linearly scalable software applications. It is widely used in a variety of industries, such as Wall Street trading applications, telecommunications platforms and online gaming.

The challenge is designed to encourage innovation around OpenSpaces and support the developer community. Prizes ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 will be awarded to those who submit the most promising applications that were built using OpenSpaces, or plug-ins, and other components that extend OpenSpaces in pioneering ways.

"We've made a huge investment in OpenSpaces internally at GigaSpaces, but we recognize that we have only scratched the surface of its potential," said Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces chief technology officer and founder. "With this challenge, we are inviting the developer community to show us what we're missing, while contributing to the community at-large. Developers will have the added bonus of possibly earning some prizes in the process."

The OpenSpaces development framework is designed to simply and dynamically scale out a software application across many computers -- also referred to as "cloud computing". It is unique in that it addresses applications that have been traditionally difficult to distribute in this manner, including high-throughput applications that are stateful, transactional or data-intensive. OpenSpaces leverages GigaSpaces' eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) as the middleware implementation, and is based on the popular Spring Framework developed by SpringSource.

"OpenSpaces enables Java and Spring developers to achieve new levels of performance and horizontal scalability using the familiar Spring component model," said Adrian Colyer, SpringSource chief technology officer and OpenSpaces Developer Challenge judge. "This challenge broadens the applicability and adoption of OpenSpaces and Spring, creating a virtuous cycle of growth and innovation for the benefit of the entire industry."

Submissions for the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge will be accepted between Dec. 10 and April 2. All applications will be reviewed and judged by a panel of industry experts, and the winners will be announced on the OpenSpaces.org Web site on April 22. The awards -- including the $10,000 first prize -- will be presented to the winners at a gala in San Francisco during the JavaOne 2008 conference in May. Winners will also be recognized in a worldwide press announcement.

The OpenSpaces Developer Challenge marks the latest initiative by GigaSpaces to encourage development and innovation in the developer community. The company provides developers with easy access to GigaSpaces' products and solutions through its Start-Up Program, which provides qualified companies and individuals with full, free and perpetual use of the company's flagship product, GigaSpaces XAP. In addition, the company provides a free Community Edition of its product and contributes to several open source initiatives, including the Spring Framework and the Mule ESB.

To encourage "early bird" applications for the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge, 10 $1,000 prizes will be drawn among those applicants who submitted an application concept (not actual code, just the concept of the proposed submission) by Jan. 29.

Interested developers should:

• Go to the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge Web site: www.openspaces.org/display/ODC/OpenSpaces+Developer+Challenge.

• Read the challenge guidelines and FAQs.

• Develop a killer application or plug-in based on OpenSpaces.

• OPTIONAL: Submit their application concept by Jan. 29 to be eligible for the 10 $1,000 "early bird" prizes.

• Submit their actual application (including code) by April 2.

About GigaSpaces

GigaSpaces provides a single application software platform for application scalability and performance. GigaSpaces' unique approach enables developers to write their business logic as if writing to a single computer and then seamlessly scale out the application linearly anywhere, and on-demand. GigaSpaces customers include leaders in the financial services, telecommunications sectors and government institutions, including: Société Générale, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Dow Jones, Virgin Mobile, Nortel and Hutchison 3G, where the need for mission-critical high-performance, low-latency, reliability and scalability necessitates an alternative to traditional approaches. GigaSpaces was founded in 2000 and has offices worldwide. For more information, visit www.gigaspaces.com, or visit the company's blog at www.gigaspacesblog.com.