Tibco took the next step in a year-old effort to unify its distributed messaging, business process management, and integration middleware products under the Tibco One umbrella architecture with release of ActiveMatrix 2.0.

Besides the legacy Tibco Rendezvous, the pubsub bus on which the company was founded (and continues to enjoy high penetration in sectors like financial services), there is BusinessWorks, Tibco’s service bus product that has been available for nearly 7 years.

The new offering aims to knit BusinessWorks in a more federated environment, and enables you to implement it either in traditional standalone mode or as a service container that can be federated in a lighter weight backbone that uses the newer ActiveMatrix Service Bus ESB.

The new release also expands Service Component Architecture (SCA) support, which can now handle projects, services, and mediations of Java and .NET-based web services. Using SCA, you can graphically assemble a BusinessWorks project using Java and .NET services, imbed mediation such as content-based routing, and include adapter configurations (not the adapters themselves), and call it all a composite application or composite service.

The bundling with the 2.0 release is part of a strategy to simplify deployment and speed time to benefit. The new bundles include:

• A SOA Starter bundle that is used for small projects or setting up a services backbone, includes the ActiveMatrix Service Bus and ActiveMatrix Policy Manager. The last piece, addressing SOA run time governance, OEMs some agent technology from AmberPoint that Tibco incorporates into its own repository and console for policy enforcement, plus a basic UDDI registry from HP Systinet.

• The Integration bundle, which includes ActiveMatrix Service Bus, ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks server, and Tibco Adapters to enterprise apps and other sources.

• The Composite Application bundle that is used for assembling apps from services, which replaces the adapters with ActiveMatrix Service Grid, which is the piece that enables you to scale a SOA implementation onto up to a hundred or so machines.

Over the past year, Tibco has amassed roughly a hundred customers for its new ActiveMatrix offering. It employs its year-old Business Studio 2.0 process and service design tool to act as the IDE to its SOA and BPM offerings. It lets you retrieve a service from the registry and drag it into a business process design, where it can be modeled in BPMN, and annotated to provide higher levels views to business analysts than would otherwise be possible with BPMN.

It still has separate tooling, some of which is Eclipse-compliant (such as BusinessStudio), some of which isn't (the more metadata driven governance pieces). BusinessStudio’s role is to at least unify design time at the business analyst level, while federating most of the run times. For instance, in the current release, providing a service container enabling BusinessWorks to hook into ActiveMatrix ESB is a major step. Operating with JVM containers, BusinessWorks exposes services using the SCA component model, and now adds the ability to communicate SOAP service requests over JMS.

That all sounds pretty complicated, but Tibco assures us that all the workings are kept well under the hood; for the business user, it’s a matter of composing services and specifying endpoints.

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