GemStone Systems was founded on March 1, 1982, as Servio Logic, to build a
database machine based on a
set theory model. Ian Huang instigated the founding, as the technology adviser to the CEO of Sampoerna Holdings (
Putera Sampoerna), by recruiting the following team, consisting of: • Frank Bouton - President, who was the cofounder of
Floating Point Systems Inc • Dr. Michael Mulder - Vice President of Engineering, who was the Group Manager for Advanced Processor Design at Sperry
Univac and Principal Architect for the
Univac 1180 mainframe • Steve Ivy - Vice President of Operation, who was a senior manager at Tektronix • Leonard Yuen - Vice President, Business Development, who was the Development Manager for the
IBM DB2 database • Dr. George Copeland - Chief Architect, who was the Senior Staff Engineer at the Advanced Development Group in
Tektronix • Steve Redfield - Chief Engineer, who was the Chief Engineer for the
Intel 80286 microprocessor • Alan Purdy - who was a Staff Engineer at Tektronix • Bob Bretl - who was a software engineering manager at Tektronix Signal Processing Systems • Allen Otis - who was also with Tektronix • John Telford - who was a software engineering manager from
Electro Scientific Industries • Monty Williams Servio Logic was renamed GemStone Systems, Inc. in June 1995. The firm developed its first hardware prototype in 1982, and shipped its first software product (GemStone 1.0) in 1986. The engineering group resides in
Beaverton, Oregon. Three of the original cofounding engineers, Bob Bretl, Allen Otis, and Monty Williams (now retired), have been with the firm since its start. GemStone's owners pioneered implementing
distributed computing in business systems. Many information system features now associated with
Java EE were implemented earlier in GemStone. GemStone and VisualWave were an early
web application server platform. (VisualWave and
VisualWorks are now owned by
Cincom.) GemStone played an important sponsorship role in the Smalltalk Industry Council at the time when
IBM was backing
VisualAge Smalltalk. As of 2005, Instantiations acquired the world-wide rights to the IBM VisualAge Smalltalk product and has rebranded it as the VAST (VA Smalltalk) Platform. After a major transition, GemStone for Smalltalk continued as
GemStone/S and various
C++ and
Java products for scalable,
multitier architecture distributed computing systems evolved into the
GemStone/J product. This in turn gave rise to
GemFire, an early example of a
Data Fabric for
complex event processing (CEP),
event stream processing (ESP),
data virtualization, and
distributed caching. On May 6, 2010,
SpringSource, a division of
VMware, announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone. On May 2, 2013, GemTalk Systems acquired the GemStone/S platform from
Pivotal Software (the
EMC and VMware spin-off). Gemfire remained with Pivotal's
Big Data division. The product is available standalone but is also integrated into its
Cloud Foundry PaaS as
Pivotal Cloud Cache. ==Product==