06.03.09
A Silver Lining in the Cloud
Tibco has always been about data and more recently processes in motion. Its heritage is as a company that connects data and applications, providing the mediation that routes and integrates data, and governs the whole process, on its way to its final destination.
So it shouldn’t be surprising in this year of the cloud and virtualization that Tibco has become the latest IT software infrastructure provider to offer a way for its customers to take advantage of the cloud,. Initially that will be Amazon EC2, but going forward there are likely to be other clouds – public and private – that Tibco will support.
Its offering, now in beta, is branded Silver, based on the notion that there is a silver lining in the cloud. In this case the lining is mediation, and governance of an environment that provides the kind of elasticity that would not otherwise be feasible with dedicated internal environments.
Not surprisingly, Silver is a manifestation in the cloud of most but not all of Tibco’s Active Matrix SOA middleware for composing, integrating, and transporting services, plus governance of the process to monitor service levels. To get an idea of what services Silver provides, look at Tibco’s Active Matrix tooling and that will give you a good idea.
For the cloud, Tibco extended many of its Active Matrix tools with new caching and user and session management capabilities to preserve state within a virtual environment. To get a very simple idea of how Silver, or Active Matrix in the cloud differs from how you would the tools on premises, you would compose by using a tool that closely resembles the Eclipse-based Active Matrix Business Studio, build a deployment archive, and then set it free. By contrast, if you were composing the same composite service-oriented application on premises, you would have to set up the testing and staging environments, then configure it for deployment on as local server. Tibco manages the underlying plumbing, providing the load balancing, failover, fault tolerance, provisioning and de-provisioning of machine instances (in this case Amazon EC2 AMIs), and service level monitoring.
Silver is still a beta, which should be pretty obvious if you go to the Silver website; it contains only barebones information at this point. Silver is essentially a pure-play Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that enables you to compose service-oriented applications fore the cloud, in the cloud. But as Tibco has always been a technology-driven company, it does a good job of explaining the tooling that it has offered but has not exactly flushed out the use cases covering the why.
As further evidence that Silver is still a work in progress, Tibco has not taken advantage of all the assets it has to truly tap the potential of composition in the cloud. For instance, while you can orchestrate and compose, you cannot necessarily model and execute the business processes that its BPM suite offers. However, it’s very understandable that BPM did not make it into the beta as that is a major chunk of technology that only addresses a portion of what its customer base needs.
But what is more surprising is that Silver for now ignores one of the most obvious use cases for the cloud: the ability to compose mashups on the fly, putting a front end to the services that customers are composing (the company has its own Ajax tools). As the cloud is in essence a lightweight approach to application deployment, so are mashups to integration. It would be logical icing on the cake were Tibco to pitch Silver as an easy composition environment for piecing together processes, services, and cool pieces of the web so business users could readily gain the flexibility of orchestration, and the accessibility and ease of deployment of the cloud.