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.