Update: Customers of Tibco Software credit the company for not only providing a range of service-oriented architecture (SOA) software, but integrating those modules into a functioning whole.
The Palo Alto, Calif., firm’s traditional business in enterprise application integration and messaging middleware has expanded to include business process management, business activity monitoring and complex event processing. In June, Tibco completed the acquisition of Spotfire Holdings, which extends Tibco’s reach into business intelligence software, a technology that analyzes an organization’s data to help users make decisions.
Tibco’s breadth of products and cohesion helped win over GFI Group, an inter-dealer brokerage that specializes in over-the-counter derivatives products.
Earlier this year, GFI set out to find a vendor that offers a complete SOA framework, says Brian Farrelly, European strategic projects director. “Collectively, [Tibco’s] products are well integrated with one another,” he says.
The first phase of GFI Group’s deployment, underway now, will focus on Tibco’s BusinessWorks product. BusinessWorks provides integration software that links disparate applications. It also provides the means for managing services that, collectively, automate processes, like trade confirmations and exceptions, in the over-the-counter derivatives business.
Maja Tibbling, lead enterprise architect with Con-way’s enterprise services unit, also cites Tibco’s integration acumen. The freight transportation firm tapped Tibco in 2002 and has since deployed the vendor’s complex event processing product, which can pull transaction data from an organization’s applications, looking for trends that could indicate, for instance, a bottleneck in the supply chain.
Tibbling says Tibco’s complex event processing software links with its business integration software, and that both products use the same integrated development environment.
Tibco’s business integration and messaging software have been the company’s bread-and-butter over the years. The company’s initial product, The Information Bus, was developed in the 1990s and used in the trading rooms of large banks and brokerages to deliver stock quotes and other financial information.
Today, Tibco’s BusinessWorks has become the company’s core offering in service-oriented architecture integration. From that base, Tibco now offers products like BusinessWorks, BusinessFactor for business activity monitoring and iProcess Suite for business process modeling, which involves the automation and orchestration of tasks that aim to achieve a particular business objective.
“We are going after the developer market more than we ever had before,” says Jeff Kristick, vice president of product marketing at Tibco. Customers initially looked at service-oriented architecture to address integration problems, he adds, but now consider the approach a way to develop software.
As Tibco continues to roll out products, one enhancement GFI’s Farrelly would like to see is a plug-and-play solution that would serve as the front end to the SOA suite.
Tibco’s Ajax-based General Interface tool lets developers create dashboards for monitoring transactions that flow through a service-oriented architecture. But Farrelly says having more of a pre-packaged, configurable dashboard would be a plus, since it would require little in the way of development.
Tibco says it has a product like that on the way, to be called ActiveMatrix Service Performance Manager. The company didn’t say, however, when the product would be released.
This story has been updated to include the actual financials 2006 fiscal year; an earlier version had incorrect financials.
|
FINANCIALS
|
*For first three months ended March 4, 2007. Fiscal year ends November 30.
Source: Company Reports
