TIBCO Software today attacked a primary inhibitor of technology innovation in the enterprise -- the care and feeding of existing systems -- by providing the industry's first universal environment for designing, deploying and managing event-driven, business process management enterprise applications and processes.
Today's software environments are increasingly complex, requiring teams of developers to understand and apply different tools for building applications, managing infrastructure, hosting services, running scripts, reporting data, managing events and business processes, and other IT needs. To address this complexity, TIBCO has developed a single design environment (TIBCO Business Studio) and browser-based operator interface (TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator) for all work done across the range of TIBCO's most important infrastructure products.
The new design environment, based on the popular Eclipse toolset, is included free as part of the next-generation TIBCO ActiveMatrix 3.0 family. The first components of ActiveMatrix 3.0 are scheduled to be generally available this month, including the underlying platform, TIBCO Business Studio, TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM, TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid and TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus.
"It's all most organizations can do to keep their existing systems running, leaving little room for IT innovation," said Ram Menon, TIBCO's Executive VP of Worldwide Marketing. "If we're going to tackle 21st-century business challenges, we need to make it dramatically easier to implement new applications and consume a lot fewer resources to keep existing systems up and running. That's why this latest version of the TIBCO ActiveMatrix product family is so important."
ActiveMatrix BPM is a new BPM technology built from the ground up on top of the TIBCO ActiveMatrix SOA foundation. This product now allows business users to define processes and rules separately from the underlying IT infrastructure, while enabling IT to scale processes faster, deploy more broadly and handle integration in the background. Customers get a single user interface, a single administrative interface and everything runs atop a single core runtime. Previously, each composite application was likely to have its own deployment scripts and its own migration processes. Reconciling the differences took time, increased errors and ultimately meant more IT staff to manage the environment. With several hundred projects in place at a typical large company, two to three software production roll-outs per week is not unusual. As a result, simplifying this process can deliver an outsized efficiency improvement for the IT organization.
With ActiveMatrix BPM, business teams can own, operate and optimize their process applications shielded from enterprise complexity. Enterprise services are provisioned transparently in the background along with access to data and applications. In addition, the workforce can be managed as a single global resource pool, breaking through functional silos to improve performance and utilization.
TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid and TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus continue to provide support for scaling up and out dynamically by building code based services as well as tying in existing services on the fly to reduce complexity, and increase flexibility and reuse. In addition, support for additional programming languages and web services standards have been added.
