Rourke McNamara

People have been using the term ESB — short for Enterprise Service Bus — for quite a few years now. Despite that, there continues to be enormous confusion over what the term means. This confusion stems from the fact that people have overloaded the term ESB and are using it to mean two different things. When people talk about ESBs, they are either talking about ESB products (ESBp) or ESB implementations (ESBi). No one can sell you an ESB implementation, just as no one can sell you an SOA. However, you can and should buy products that help to implement this design pattern.

TIBCO Software Inc’s ActiveMatrix product launched the first week of December. In the intervening two weeks there has been quite a bit written about this new product. What follows is a quick overview of what people are saying about ActiveMatrix and service virtualization.

I’m proud to work for a company that produces innovative software in a space dominated by companies who purchase innovative software companies but rarely innovate themselves. Today TIBCO (my employer) launched three new products under a new brand, TIBCO ActiveMatrix. These products are designed to mitigate some of the complexity that comes along as an unfortunate side-effect of embracing SOA styled development.

Forget the marketing terms and high level messages — what do the products that TIBCO released today really do?