You can tell you’re at a techie conference when the CEO’s opening address
steps you through the generations of IT history. Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadivé,
who roughly a decade ago wrote a book on the power of real-time information, is
now telling us that real-time isn’t fast enough; you need to be able to predict
the foreseeable future based on patterns that are emerging today. What was kind
of amusing was that as he was drawing Tibco’s vision of event-driven architecture
(EDA), events took their own turn as his slide presentation anticipated what Ranadive
was going to talk about next, and advanced from the EDA architectural diagram
to the next shot before he was through. Check out Dana’s Gardner’s ZDNet
blog for another account of Ranadive’s keynote.
TUCON 2008 provided some interesting tidbits of a company in transition. Like
most major software players, it came off a good 2007 and, Q1 2008 wasn’t
too shabby either (like the rest of the software industry, we’re waiting
for Q3 and 4 to see if Tibco and its peers can handle the truth). Like most
active mid-tier players, the company is embarking on a SOA transition that hasn’t
always been well explained to its customers. In part it’s due to the fact
that Tibco has had to layer over a legacy, the penalty paid for being the first
on the block, but mostly it’s due to the fact that the company has not
adequately communicated its message as to how all the pieces are fitting together.
With Tibco ONE, which seeks to unify the design experience across all its tools,
busses, and process engines, it’s made an auspicious start. But to date,
the company lacks a page to explain what the ActveMatrix brand is, and the vision
and message behind it. Enter “Tibco ActiveMatrix” in Google today,
and aside from point product listings, you’ll get a SOA landing page with
a list of ActiveMatrix products underneath it.
The highlights of Tibco’s announcements include a welcome addition to
run time SOA governance, Service Performance Manager, which cleverly bundles
some of its Business Events complex event processing technology to tell you
whether you’re meeting the Service Level Agreements, at least from a performance
standpoint. It takes the assumption that service levels are a classic complex
event processing problem, especially given the kinds of highly scaled and highly
distributed networks that Tibco customers tend to have. We attended a live podcast
recording session led by Dana Gardner that featured independent analyst Joe
McKendrick, IDC analyst Sandy Rogers, Tibco SOA marketing manager Rourke McNamara,
and Allstate technology solutions VP Anthony Abbatista that plumbed the topic
to more detail, which should be published soon by Gardner and Tibco.
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