Tibco is looking to the cloud with its biggest product refresh in a decade, unveiled at the Tucon 2010 user conference in Las Vegas today.
A primary addition to the product range is extensions to the Silver application development system to allow deployment to the Cloud and data flow analytics that speed up and automate processes to deliver competitive advantage, Tibco claimed.
The introduction of CAP (Composite Application Platform) and BPM (Business Process Management) modules to the Tibco Silver range extends application deployment and management to cloud vendor environments. Initially, this is aimed at Amazon EC2 but other cloud providers will be added in coming months, Vivek Ranadiv, chairman and chief executive of Tibco, announced.
Silver automatically packages an application along with essential parts of the operating system to produce effectively a software appliance that can easily be uploaded to the cloud.
Rourke McNamara, Tibco's senior director of product marketing, said that confidence in the cloud is still building and many enterprises want to deploy to the cloud to pilot the scheme, or to deploy quickly, and later download it again and run it conventionally within the company data centre.
There are limits to Silver at present because of the redaction process to draw out the elements from the operating system. Windows is not suitable so Silver is devised for applications running on Linux or in Java.
The main advantage of this process is that the hardware component becomes irrelevant in a similar way to using virtualisation. However, Silver trims down the application so that it is as lean as possible, rather than running on a full OS.
Enterprise 3.0
Ranadiv also announced other products grouped under the notional banner of Enterprise 3.0. "Enterprise 3.0 requires the ability to properly manage the right information at the right place in the right time. Even as volumes of events are exploding," he said.
Navigating through the torrent of transactions multi-terabyte and petabyte databases generate efficiently and thoroughly will allow companies to capitalise on a "two second advantage", he explained.
This time difference is delivered by intelligent software running in memory and using rules to deliver data in a context that can be immediately acted upon.
Business Events 4.0
The key product announced today for fulfilling this vision was BusinessEvents 4.0, an upgrade that enables faster, scalable rules processing to analyse and react to meaningful events. McNamara used the example of a bag that is discovered at the airport as the plane it should have been on departs.
"Undoubtedly, there will be an unsatisfied customer but if that bag can be re-routed automatically to the next available flight or onto a chain of flights, the customer may only be inconvenienced for a matter of hours rather than days," he said. "Also the omission can be relayed to the customer and avoid them unnecessarily standing in front of a baggage reclaim conveyor and suffering further inconvenience in having to report the loss."
Alongside BusinessEvents, Tibco launched upgrades for ActiveMatrix, Spotfire and ActiveSpaces. The suite provides the tools to develop the event management environment and automate remedial actions, including sending messages to anyone involved.
