Yesterday, SpringSource announced the GA release of SpringSource Enterprise. As our first commercial product release, this is an important milestone for us. The engineering team did an amazing job putting this release together. The package includes enterprise versions of Spring, the SpringSource Tool Suite, SpringSource Application Management Suite and SpringSource Advanced Pack for Oracle Database, all designed to make it easier to develop, deploy, and manage enterprise-class applications.

You can test drive SpringSource Enterprise yourself: http://www.springsource.com/products/enterprise.

We think that this product will be valuable to our users both in development and in production. In particular, the certified, indemnified version of Spring that is instrumented for management coupled with global, 24X7 support network "from the source" provides real value above and beyond the open source implementation.

Coming from a closed-source software company, I am still learning what a tremendous role the community can play in product development – everything from formulating product concepts to real-life trials of the finished product. For example, Arnold Goldberg at LinkedIn provided invaluable input to our roadmap. And we've had an excellent response to the beta program in terms of downloads and feedback. Mark Schwartz, at Aetna put the SpringSource value proposition nicely in our press release when he said “…The support comes directly from the experts who created Spring. You can't get any better than that for timely and accurate resolution of the kinds of problems we see on a daily basis in the software development process.” All of this feedback has been greatly appreciated.

Looking ahead, the Engineering team here at SpringSource is extremely busy with our next major GA release: the SpringSource Application Platform. We want to give our customers the best possible software infrastructure for running Spring-powered applications. We think our first release of the Platform will go a long way toward accomplishing that goal.

Hope you like it!