In-Depth

Beyond Real Time: Tibco Aims for Predictive Business

Company promises to deliver enterprises that can predict—and plan for—the future.

• By Rethink Research Associates
• 10/07/2003

Tibco promises to deliver not only enterprises that can react in real time, but those that can predict the future. The company is planning a series of product announcements, starting now and running through the first half of 2004. The company kicked off the process by announcing the Tibco Enterprise Messaging platform, which it says enables fully transparent connectivity between all its existing messaging products (including Enterprise for JMS, Rendezvous, and SmartSockets), better routing, and support for J2EE, .NET, and Web services. The product will be delivered in the first quarter next year.

Tibco says that its plans will include partnerships with Hewlett-Packard and Intel, which will together make available IT white papers, services, training, and products in an effort to drive broad industry support for the predictive enterprise.

The company’s rhetoric has it that a predictive enterprise will reliably anticipate the needs of its business, avoiding problems while creating and realizing new opportunities. The infrastructure required for a predictive enterprise includes technologies that collect, integrate, and present information to applications and people in real-time.

Tibco says its announcements will fall into three categories: continued investments and enhancement to core infrastructure; advancing the real-time enterprise; and delivering a road map for the predictive enterprise, which it says will be a standards-based reference architecture for accelerating application integration.

Tibco also announced upgrades to its core integration platform by adding BusinessWorks 5.0, Business Works Workflow 5.0 and BusinessFactor 4.2 for delivery in the fourth quarter this year.

BusinessWorks 5.0 offers rapid modeling of new business processes that can activate changes in process, which Tibco sees as the basis for continuous system improvement and adaptation, and says it has “out-of-the-box” integration with the Tibco PortalBuilder. Business Works Workflow 5.0 is new and offers full integration of process automation and workflow in a single environment with a new forms-builder approach, while BusinessFactor 4.2 is a standardized method for developing and managing performance metrics needed to make business decisions.

According to Tibco, these enhancements will enable companies to anticipate the needs of the business making them able to collect, integrate, and present information to applications and people in real time. They all make way for the future introduction of a series of products under the banner of Enterprise Management Insight that will roll out next year.

There is a large element of “me, too” about these announcements, given that PeopleSoft, Oracle, and SAP have been touting business in “real time” for quite a while. Tibco is trying to steal the high ground in EAI for when enterprise applications and systems management companies require enterprise integration tools.