TIBCO Software (TIBX)

TIBCO unveiled a series of products and services that target service performance management, and that leverage the insights that managed complex events processing [CEP] provides. These complex events processing and service performance management find common ground -- to help provide a new level of insurance against failure for SOA and for enterprise IT architects.

They deal with organizations like Allstate, which have massive size and scale, with 750 services. People are moving away from the older ways of doing things -- from the siloed applications, the siloed business unit way of doing things -- to the SOA, services-based way of doing things, you don’t ignore the new complexities you are introducing.

SOA is helping the companies reuse services. They are making services available, so that that functionality, that code, doesn’t need to be rewritten time and time again. In doing so the company reduces the amount of work, the cost of building new applications, of building new functionality for a business organization.

On the vendor sports angle, TIBCO remains one of the few remaining standalone commercial middleware/SOA infrastructure vendors. With BEA Systems (BEAS) now under the auspices of Oracle (ORCL), Cape Clear under Workday, IONA Technologies (IONA) ) also remains independent (but appears to be in play, with Software AG rumored to be in pursuit).

Many of the open source providers are rapidly expanding their SOA infrastructure perview, not the least of which is this week's Red Hat announcements about their SOA stack, built significantly from the JBoss community.

They came home labout 14th April, 2008 with a gold star when SearchSOA.com named its ActiveMatrix SOA platform a "Product of the Year" in the assembly and integration category in SearchSOA.com's annual awards.The award was sweeter for the Palo Alto, Calif., company because it was based on products released before TIBCO had announced a beefed-up version of ActiveMatrix 2.0, adding new functions and a new enterprise service bus [ESB].

ActiveMatrix provides a single platform for developing, deploying and managing heterogeneous SOA. It includes capabilities for service integration, composite application development and governance. Expect more in the service performance management space from TIBCO soon.

TIBCO claims that customers using version 2.0 can achieve additional business process productivity gains, and can lower total cost of ownership compared to alternative approaches.

There seems some upside in open source SOA, and we may soon see the real cost-benefits competition occur not between the large, comprehensive suppliers like International Business Machines (IBM) , Oracle (ORCL) and Microsoft (MSFT) -- but more generally between open source SOA providers and commercial ones. As with IONA and Mule, we also see that combinations of open source development and commercial distribution and support can be a powerful and productive tag-team.