Tibco entering hardware space

Tibco Software is set to make a play in the computer hardware space, readying its Tibco Messaging Appliance for ultra-low-latency messaging deployments.

The device was featured at the Tibco User Conference (TUCON) in San Francisco on Wednesday. Due in September, the appliance will be used for applications such as algorithmic trading and serve as an addition to the Tibco Rendezvous messaging product family. It will accelerate the capabilities of Rendezvous software and work with existing Tibco Rendezvous messaging application installations.

“This is the first Tibco appliance,” said Matt Quinn, Tibco senior vice president of engineering and technologies. The company is expanding into hardware to accommodate what was described as explosion in event-processing.

Details were not offered on than the internals of the appliance, such as what type of processor it uses. The product will cut datacenter power utilization and optimize space utilization, Tibco said.

While a press statement on the appliance called it Tibco Messaging Appliance, a slide of the appliance shown at the conference bore the nameplate, P-7500. Solace Systems is manufacturing the appliance.

Quinn stressed Tibco’s emphasis on event-driven computing and the company’s Chairman and CEO, Vivek Ranadive, also emphasized event processing during an earlier keynote presentation.

IT, Ranadive said, has moved from the mainframe-dominated  Enterprise 1.0 stage in the 1960s to Enterprise 2.0 in the late-1970s and 1980s, marked by databases. Now, it is in its Enterprise 3.0 phase, which is an event-driven era.

“We have to be able to tie 100 million events to a terabyte of information, and we have to do that in sub-second response times, said Ranadive.

Tibco used the conference to roll out several new products and strategies, including its planned use of Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in technology as an avenue for developing rich interfaces for Tibco products. Silverlight will complement Tibco’s General Interface technology.

Also announced was availability of SpotFire enterprise analytics software, featuring mashup capabilities. Integration with existing mashups also is featured. Tibco’s Spotfire operational analytics system also was announced, featuring a closed-loop system for analysis and making continual business improvements.

Tibco introducd ActiveSpaces, for handling large volumes of data in memory with very fast access time. “Distibuted cache is a complex problem,” and Tibco wants to make this technology easy to use, Quinn said.

The company’s Business Events version 3 system, meanwhile, is in final phases of testing. It will provide distributed and clustered rules, complex event processing and a streaming engine.

The Tibco iProcess BPM system version 11 was unveiled, offering real-time worklist management, an updated installation and capabilities for LDAP. Accompanying iProcess 11 is Business Studio version 3, featuring Eclipse backing and enablement of process as services. Business Studio has provided business process management capabilities such as modeling.

Tibco announced Managed Transfer, for complex file transfer. ActiveMatrix Service Performance Management, for predictive performance, also was announced.

Enterprise Message Service Version 5 was rolled out, offering new support for server to client-side multicasts and improvements in database support, security and plug-in capabilities.

Ranadive aired his vision of how the future will be about predictive business and correlating events. He also cited event-driven SOA.

A Tibco user speaking at the conference, Anthony Abbatista, vice president of technology solutions at Allstate, cited progress the company has made in revamping its own internal IT practices. Five years ago, the company had a lot of different varieties of software, few common frameworks and adherence to numerous and sometimes-conflicting standards. Reuse was limited, and Allstate had many shallow relationships with many vendors. Point-to-point integration was common.

Now Allstate uses Java and .Net frameworks as a basis for increased reuse and speed and uses data hubs. “We have petabytes of data now,” with data volumes growing 30 percent to 40 percent annually, Abbatista said.

Allstate also adheres to consistent industry standards, now has just a handful of strategic partners and has accomplished a lot without increasing its technology budget, he said.