TIBCO announced general availability of key new products to the TIBCO ActiveMatrixTM platform, the industry’s first service virtualization platform that allows applications to be created, deployed and governed as distributed, standards-based services in heterogeneous environments regardless of their native language.

The new TIBCO ActiveMatrix product releases constitute the first phase of the company’s ongoing Project Matrix initiative and complement the company’s world-class service creation and orchestration offerings in TIBCO BusinessWorksTM. The first three TIBCO ActiveMatrix products include TIBCO ActiveMatrixTM Service Grid, TIBCO ActiveMatrixTM Policy Manager and TIBCO ActiveMatrixTM Registry. Together, TIBCO’s suite of SOA offerings provide some of the broadest and deepest capabilities available today in the market and position customers to go beyond the initial hype of “some other acronym”, to harness SOA’s inherent complexity, and to innovate for competitive advantage.

“TIBCO understands the needs of today’s CIOs,” said Shirley Bridges, CIO of Delta Air Lines and president and CEO of Delta Technology, Delta’s wholly owned subsidiary. “That is why we chose to extend our existing relationship and become an early adopter of TIBCO ActiveMatrix. With this release, TIBCO looks to solve the emerging class of challenges around SOA deployment and governance, and provides a platform that mirrors Delta’s own vision for architecting our future. We are confident that this implementation will help us increase overall flexibility while lowering costs.”

The factors driving SOA and the benefits that result are very real, in part explaining the intense marketing and development attention devoted to the technology. So too are the new and emerging class of challenges resulting from this transformational shift. These include the complexity resulting from the proliferation of services across heterogeneous application platforms, the difficulty in deploying, reusing and managing these services across different platforms, and the costs associated with these efforts running higher than expected.

The TIBCO ActiveMatrix service virtualization platform addresses these challenges by introducing a new service container approach to the development, deployment and governance of services across the enterprise. Using TIBCO ActiveMatrix, software developers can write core business logic for an application and deploy that business logic as a “virtualized” service in a service machine, or container, which makes all other details configurable. Enterprises adopting service virtualization benefit in several ways:

1.      Less code: Developers gain time and flexibility by writing just the business logic for an application and letting the virtualization environment manage everything else;

2.      More flexibility: Services are more easily promoted, reused and changed across departments; and

3.      Easier governance: Service and policy configuration, deployment and management are done centrally, not separately, for each application server, ESB or orchestration engine.

The end result is a platform that frees developers to do what they do best, minimizes needless time and costs associated with deploying web services, and enables enterprises to build a reference architecture that meets the demands of today’s competitive business environment.

Products Available Immediately 

·         TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid: a distributed service container for creating and deploying Java, Java EE, .NET and other services as composite applications; based on Java Specification Request (JSR) 208 and Service Component Architecture (SCA) specifications. 

·         TIBCO ActiveMatrix Policy Manager: a policy management product that enables IT to define, distribute, and enforce rules for security, auditing, logging, service levels, and other application characteristics across a wide range of services built on Java and .NET, as well as custom and packaged applications

·         TIBCO ActiveMatrix Registry: a standards-based system of record for discovering, categorizing, and publishing services that provides the foundation required to improve service reuse and promote services from development through to production

“Our customers are relying less upon the extortionist architecture of the past to solve today’s and tomorrow’s challenges,” said Vivek Ranadivé, chairman and CEO, TIBCO. “Instead, they are embracing the democratization of software that SOA represents and seeking products such as TIBCO ActiveMatrix to develop and deploy their own ‘killer applications’ for competitive advantage.”