Intelligent Enterprise

VentanaMonitor™

Summary

Tibco is well known as a leader in messaging backbone technology with its patented "information bus." But it has evolved well beyond this position over the last year to become a critical provider of information technology tools and applications for global organizations. Tibco, a trusted provider of 'plumbing' for global information architecture and processing, has introduced a three-part framework it refers to as "Backbone, Integration and Optimization". Ventana Research sees this evolution of Tibco as a critical step for its customers and for the market, which is maturing to provide valuable tools for businesses that leverage information across the enterprise.

Assessment

Tibco has introduced a simplified view of how it is evolving its product roadmap to meet enterprise IT and business requirements. This enterprise-wide approach spans from IT to business and will provide Tibco's customers the ability to fully leverage the value of information messaging and process management.

At the bottom of the technology stack, Tibco provides a 'backbone,' or information processing layer, with a product called Rendezvous. This enterprise messaging services-based product provides message transport across all types of protocols, adapters and interfaces leveraging industry standards. Another product, Tibco Hawk, is a management and monitoring infrastructure that improves usage and administration of Tibco and non-Tibco products. With its Enterprise Management Advisor, inter-operability with network storage management, and partnerships with Computer Associates, Hewlett Packard, BMC Software and Veritas, Tibco has a wide range of adapters that tightly integrate with the centralized metadata for re-use and impact analysis.

Tibco BusinessWorks address the next layer, "integration." Businessworks provides a process and service management set of capabilities that assist in the management and flow of information inside and outside of a company, through a model, assemble, deploy, and manage approach, to gain efficiency in implementation and deployment of system-level processing in a service-oriented architecture. More than just application-to-application integration workflow processing, this standards-compliant platform leverages .NET, JMS, EJB, SOAP and many other interfaces to enable a company to manage information processing with sophisticated rules and workflow. The wizard-based approach to assembling data-level application integration into workflow and processes is quite efficient and provides collaboration techniques that require fewer resources to complete the integration development tasks.

The top layer, and the latest in Tibco's strategy, is "optimization" — allowing the products to be used together and separately to help organizations gain visibility and improve the performance of their business activities and processes. The first product is BusinessFactor, which some refer to as a Business Activity Monitoring application, but it is much more than just monitoring. It enables access, analysis, visualization and sharing of real time and historical information from any operational source, including Tibco and any integration infrastructure including data feeds or event listing mechanisms. With a business-user centric approach, BusinessFactor goes beyond traditional BI by providing contextual discovery and monitoring of business activities in real or right time. In addition, Tibco created OpsFactor, which is dedicated to operational monitoring of the Tibco BusinessWorks product.