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.
Three articles discussing service virtualization have popped up in the last 24 hours. Not all of them use the term service virtualization, but they’re all referring to the concept.
Todd Biske posted an article on his blog that eloquently explains the need to scale services differently from web applications — the load characteristics are not the same. Todd refers to BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition as a tool that can help quickly bring up extra instances of services hosted in a traditional application server to meet load spikes, but ActiveMatrix Service Grid is an even better option. Last week TIBCO’s Matt Quinn talked about service virtualization at a Gartner event and specifically addressed the value in scaling services at the service level, rather than scaling an entire application server instance. ActiveMatrix Service Grid is the only product on the market today that allows you to do that.
Yesterday Matt Quinn of TIBCO Software, Inc. talked about Service Virtualization at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services conference in Orlando. Matt started his presentation by saying that Service Virtualization is:
Functionality designed to reduce complexity of communication, location and control as service networks increase in size.
Service Virtualization, a key feature of TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid, is a technology meant to help companies deal with the complexity that comes with doing large-scale heterogeneous SOA. Period. Matt spent some time at the beginning introducing some of the problems companies with large service networks are beginning to face, including communications management and service scaling challenges. Matt then talked about how TIBCO’s approach to Service Virtualization helps to solve these problems.
I’m in Orlando this week at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit as part of TIBCO Software’s launch of TIBCO ActiveMatrix. Our booth has been mobbed with people asking questions about ActiveMatrix and Service Virtualization. Response to this new technology has been very positive, though there has been some confusion. Explaining what ActiveMatrix does in 90 seconds isn’t easy, but we (in the booth) have all gotten better at it in the course of the last day.
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?
