Ranadive, who founded Tibco in 1997, said: If you look at something like Siebel’s [SEBL] Universal Applications Network [UAN], they need a standards-based integration offering to plug and play all of the XML-based standards from all of their partners. Who did they turn to for that? Tibco.
As for claims by competitor SeeBeyond Technology Corp [SBYN] its own integration server is now a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)-based application server, whereas Tibco’s is proprietary, Ranadive said: That’s a joke. Our enterprise messaging bus for instance is all about J2EE. We have customer after customer using this because it supports standards.
A spat between the two vendors began on March 11, when SeeBeyond announced a fully J2EE-based version of its integration server, eGate. SeeBeyond criticized rivals’ proprietary integration servers, adding its J2EE approach provided ease of management, increased support for open standards, and the ability to use companies’ existing application servers such as IBM Corp’s [IBM] WebSphere and BEA Systems Inc’s [BEA] WebLogic.
Tibco hit back later that month when its CTO Tommy Joseph defended the company’s proprietary integration server, which he conceded is not J2EE-based, but does offer support for integration of J2EE, Corba, COM, and other data sources. Joseph said the advantages of being J2EE-based are enjoyed by the vendor, rather than end users.
SeeBeyond, though, took issue with this argument. Dr Ian Howells, EMEA vice president of marketing, said: To say there are no advantages for the end user is simply not true. Proprietary integration servers involve higher risk for customers. It means they must manage two big servers [the integration server as well as the application server], and there is a massive performance overhead too.
According to Howells, proprietary integration servers mean moving data between the application server and integration server is handled by queuing systems. The alternative is to use one server, the application server, he said. That’s way, way quicker.
In its latest quarter ended September 30, SeeBeyond announced sales of $32.4 million, up 12% over the same period in the year earlier. Tibco, meanwhile, in its third quarter posted sales of $66.1 million, up only 4.4% on the year-ago quarter. But SeeBeyond posted a net loss of $4.8 million, compared to Tibco’s net income of $2.7 million.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
