While Tibco is unlikely to launch an application server of its own, that market already being well-served by BEA Systems, IBM, Sun and Oracle amongst others, Tibco senior product marketing manager EMEA, Francois D’Haegeleer, confirmed in an interview with ComputerWire that we don’t currently play in the application server space but we want to offer more in that area to our customers.
Mr D’Haegeleer said that the ‘wrappering’ of application servers is possible, in part, thanks to the emerging Java Business Integration (JBI) standard. The JBI standard will allow us to encapsulate J2EE servers, wrapper them and put them on the [integration] bus. Then you can monitor and manage those servers inside the Tibco environment, said Mr D’Haegeleer.
JBI is a standard that aims to extend J2EE with integration system programming interfaces (SPIs). It’s a project led by Sun and supported by a raft of application server, integration and application development companies, including Tibco, Sonic Software, Oracle, webMethods, SeeBeyond Technology, Iona Technologies and JBoss. Notable by their absence are IBM and BEA, who recently abandoned their participation.
Mr D’Haegeleer said that the advantage of being able to wrapper third party application servers is that they could then be managed and monitored within the Tibco integration framework, and Tibco’s tools could be used to build data and process integrations regardless of the platform they are finally run on – IBM, BEA, JBoss or a combination of application servers.
Mr D’Haegeleer said he was not able to put a likely date on the launch of the application server ‘wrappering’ technology just yet, but it is unlikely to be launched before the year-end.
It is possible that the move is also of strategic value – bringing the application servers into Tibco’s integration domain potentially gives Tibco the upper hand against application server vendors like IBM, BEA, Sun, Oracle, and SAP. All of these vendors are increasingly peddling their own integration messages, potentially presenting Tibco with stiffer competition. Bringing the application server into the Tibco domain may just help the company to maintain the logic that, if you want integration technology, you turn to a pure-play like Tibco and simply plug application servers into that platform as you need to. BEA et al will argue the reverse – and if they are successful they will put a squeeze on Tibco and the other integration pure-plays.
Recently however, Tibco has shown little sign of being squeezed from any direction. For its most recent quarter ended August 31 sales were up 60% year on year to $106 million, and net income came in at $8.6 million. It also has $179 million cash and equivalents in the bank.
Tibco’s prospects were boosted late last year when a new agreement with Reuters, which has been gradually reducing its stake in the company, meant that for the first time Tibco was free to sell its software into the financial services market. Prior to that it was Reuters who sold Tibco into that market. While the company does not split out revenue by industry sector, Mr D’Haegeleer said that the company is hiring, hiring, hiring to expand its team dealing with the financial services and insurance sectors.
Also of note is Tibco’s $217 million acquisition of process management player Staffware in June this year, the success (or otherwise) of which will be evident when Staffware’s sales are included in Tibco’s next quarterly results.
