GemStone is a proprietary application framework that was first available for Smalltalk as an object database.

GemStone's owners pioneered implementing distributed computing in business systems . Many information system features now associated with J2EE 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 (VA is now at Instantiations).

After a major transition, GemStone for Smalltalk continues as "GemStone/S" and various C++ and Java products for scalable, multi-tier distributed systems. GemStone Systems, Inc. now develops and markets GemFire, which is notable for CEP (complex event processing), Event Stream Processing, data virtualization and distributed caching.

Just as Smalltalk continues to be a competitive advantage in many major financial institutions such as JP Morgan although not often mentioned in print, GemStone systems continue as mission-critical applications although many computing industry business publications focus attention on Java or C# for Microsoft .NET for new development. GemStone frameworks remain of interest for web services and service-oriented architectures.

A recent revival of interest in Smalltalk has occurred as a result its use to successfully generate Javascript for top-rated e-commerce web pages or in web application frameworks such as the Seaside web framework, but systems based on object databases are not as common as those based on ORM or Object-relational mapping frameworks such as TopLink or new-comer Hibernate. In the area of web application frameworks, JBoss and BEA Weblogic are somewhat analogous to GemStone.

The engineering group resides in Beaverton, Oregon.