Tibco Software Inc is fleshing out its message-oriented suite of middleware products with new a high-level routing tool and management, application and infrastructure services. Having perhaps unwisely gotten itself mixed up with the hype and hoopla of push technology Tibco’s keen to re-assert its enterprise credentials and these days likes to portray itself as a software integration company with multicast push applications, an object request broker and now a message translation system. Tibco is testing a new message broker framework software it claims will enable developers to route messages between different networks applications regardless of the content or destination. Separately-available pipeline modules convert the content of an incoming message into a form used by the software’s transformation and routing engine which directs the message to destinations based upon a set of rules established by the user. The $25,000 message broker is written in Java and works in conjunction with Tibco’s TIB/Rendezvous push technology-based publish-and-subscribe software. Although supported only on Solaris and NT to begin with, it can send and receive messages to non-Java applications running on any platform running TIB/Rendezvous. The original message can be restored if information is lost in the translation. Tibco claims the broker will support formats such as MQSeries, MSMQ in future, Corba and DCOM and says it differs from other bridge or transformation mechanisms because it works with a rules engine which can be easily created by the user rather than a complicated database. Tibco is also selling a system monitoring product called Hawk which it claims can report any kind of network activity including CPU usage, processes, applications, files and logs. Tibco says the Hawk technology has existed within its software for three years but not previously productized. It costs $3,000 per server node running from Windows. Tibco’s now shipping its ObjectBus 2.0 Corba 2.0 object request broker priced at $10,000. Tibco is putting its medley of products under a single marketing umbrella called TIB/ActiveEnterprise. It includes the Events/Console publish and subscribe interface system from its inCommon acquisition; Adapters to integrate messages from discrete applications – an SAP adapter is now shipping with Baan, Peoplesoft, Clarify and Remedy versions to follow; ContentBroker; MessageBroker; connections to third-party middleware systems including IBM MQ and the web with MSMQ to follow; Hawk monitoring; ObjectBus; Enterprise Transaction Express for enterprise messaging requiring guaranteed message delivery; and the Rendezvous message-oriented middleware.
