Today TIBCO announced general availability of TIBCO ActiveMatrix™ 2.0 which is designed to simplify SOA development, deployment and management. While SOA is being widely recognized and an architectural best practice for enabling business and IT to respond quickly and more easily implement new solutions, SOA is not a single technology, which makes it inherently complex. The challenge is to get all the different technologies that comprise a SOA solution to work together easily.

TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix allows companies to design, develop, deploy, manage and govern SOA solutions without having to worry about each of the underlying technologies. It is a grid architecture that enables different technologies to be “plugged in”. The grid provides the integration and common management and governance across all the technologies.

In ActiveMatrix 2.0 BusinessWorks now runs natively as a container. You can take existing BusinessWorks projects, including BPEL orchestration, can compose it with java or .Net and deploy and manage it all as a single application. Adapters also run in service containers. You can take a configuration that defines what functionality is being exposed from the application, such as SAP or a database, deploy it in an ActiveMatrix container, and it becomes a fully managed service.

ActiveMatrix 2.0 has added a new standalone engine for service mediation. Tibco has unbundled the service bus (ESB) from BusinesWorks to provide a lower price entry point for developing new services that can be plugged into the ActiveMatrix platform.

TIBCO has also expanded its SCA support. SCA emphasizes the decoupling of service implementation and service assembly from the details of the technical infrastructure and access methods used to invoke services. SCA components operate at a business level and use a minimum of middleware APIs. The companies contributing to the SCA standard include: BEA Systems, Cape Clear Software, IBM, Interface21, IONA Technologies PLC, Oracle, Primeton Technologies Ltd, Progress Software, Red Hat Inc., Rogue Wave Software, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, TIBCO Software Inc. As more companies build SCA support into their platforms it will make services easier to deploy. This is TIBCO’s goal is supporting SCA.

ActiveMatrix 2.0’s SCA support includes a composition editor as well as expanded deployment and management support. It provides an integrated service view which shows a service with all its dependencies. This enables operations to more easily understand what might be the root cause of a failure. Policy management is also available for all services. When services are built with ActiveMatrix all the SCA annotations are automatically generated. TIBCO claims this contributes to up to 50 percent greater productivity and lower cost of ownership. Integration, maintenance and governance are built into the platform, and available regardless of the technology used to develop the service.

ActiveMatrix 2.0 can also import process models developed in Visio or Aris, make them live, and tie them to the applications. The integrated registry and repository can then show how business processes are impacted by changes. This allows better alignment between IT and the Business.

From a pure architectural standpoint, ActiveMatrix 2.0 represents best practices for creating an integrated infrastructure. It simplifies SOA by providing a set of common infrastructure services to all business level services, regardless of technology difference, making it almost as easy to deploy a new business service as it is to plug in a new appliance into the electrical grid.

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