Executive questions hype around ESBs Despite its skepticism about the current ESB (enterprise service bus) trend, Tibco may nonetheless offer an ESB product in the coming months. A plan to boost BAM (business activity monitoring) with a lower-end offering is also in the works, according to Tibco officials in an interview earlier this month.In general terms, an ESB provides Web services-based messaging for communication between systems. But Ram Menon, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Tibco, said the industry is still sorting out a definition. An ESB, Menon said, means “different things to different people.”“On one side, the ESB promotes all the concepts that we’ve been talking about for the last 15 years,” such as distributed, services-based architectures and standards. “We do think that the ESB does not solve all the problems associated with messaging. ESB is really a departmental solution,” Menon said Tibco believes its products already provide the integration customers need, but the company may yet bring out a lighter, Web services-based version of its Enterprise Message Services product.In the BAM arena, Tibco’s OpsFactor product — due to be announced May 18 — will provide BPM (business process monitoring) at a lower price and is intended to enable users to deploy BAM more quickly. OpsFactor will be optimized to monitor processes in the company’s BusinessWorks integration product, which manages the life cycle of integration projects.Tibco defines BAM as the aggregation and analysis of relevant, timely information about business activities. Software DevelopmentTechnology IndustryDatabasesApplication IntegrationSmall and Medium Business