Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Tibco ActiveMatrix

Unbelievable: Tibco makes their latest product - ActiveMatrix - available for download! And some of the documentation is directly accessible. It is so much easier for independent consultants like me if vendors make such crucial information readily available.

Although both products have different backgrounds and different views, I recognize the same "distributed architecture" as in Fiorano. In particular the distributed execution with central configuration and management (most integration products are hub-and-spoke). And a strong JMS implementation underneath, TibcoEMS and FioranoMQ respectively. Obviously, Tibco ActiveMatrix focuses much more on (web) service mediation, policy enforcement and is a pretty advanced product.

But a more important player and competitor is BEA's AquaLogic Service Bus: ALSB also focuses on proxying web services, policy enforcement, service monitoring and management. But one difference between ActiveMatrix and AquaLogic is the hosting of business services: ActiveMatrix is a container for business services (even in .Net), while AquaLogic envisions services to be deployed in their WebLogic application server or 3rd party containers.

Looking forward to dive deeper into ActiveMatrix. And it is always interesting to see the architectural directions an important and independent vendor such as Tibco takes.

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