Rourke on SOA

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.

The quickest mentions to appear were the short, high level articles that provided bit more depth and color than the press releases. These articles included Martin Veitch’s piece in IT Week, Paul Krill’s write-up in InfoWorld, and Antone Gonsalves’ article in InformationWeek. Antone’s article contains a quote by ZapThink that questions the usefulness of SOA related middleware in general. Antone and TIBCO touched base after the article was published, resulting in this blog entry questioning the value to end-users of SOA related standards. Antone makes some really good points, both of which deserve further inspection. In this entry, I responded to Antone’s article, explaining why ActiveMatrix is different from the class of middleware that he and ZapThink were referring to.

In India, ActiveMatrix was mentioned in CIO India and SDA India. These mentions were mostly in the context of some work TIBCO is doing with major Indian systems integration firms, including TCS. There were actually quite a few mentions of ActiveMatrix in publications outside the US, but I won’t mentioned anything that isn’t in English due to a limitation of the poster (I only understand English).

Early the week after launch, an article in Reg Developer took much closer look at ActiveMatrix and what it means to SOA developers. David Norfolk did a really great job explaining what makes ActiveMatrix new, valuable, and different. If you only follow two links, check out the Reg Developer piece and the Computer World article covered below.

That same week, there was a bit of buzz in the blogosphere around service virtualization. Computer World kicked things off with a great article discussing what Delta is doing with TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix product — Delta is an early adopter of ActiveMatrix, using it as the heart of Delta Nervous System 2. Joe McKendrick, on the SOA in Action blog, made the connection between the concepts Delta was talking about and some of the scaling related concepts that Todd Biske had just blogged about. Over at ZDNet, Joe summed up the talk about service virtualization in his blog post.

Joe’s post quoted a representative from IBM’s grid group who said that virtualization had nothing to do with SOA. On that same day another IBM rep gave a webinar entitled, “Virtualize Application Server Resources to Handle Spikes in Workload Demands.” The webinar expounded on the need for virtualization technologies in an SOA world. IBM even used the term “service virtualization”, but IBM was referring to dynamic addition of servers to an application server cluster based on load. TIBCO’s technology allows you to scale at the service level based on load on that service. Further, The ActiveMatrix technology doesn’t limit you to Java, while IBM’s approach certainly appears to.

Previous to my current role, I was the product manager for TIBCO’s BusinessWorks product. It was nice to see Andrew Binstock award BusinessWorks the highest score InfoWorld has given an ESB in his recent review. There’s a brief mention of ActiveMatrix at the end of the article, but the focus is on what makes BusinessWorks the best ESB available on the market.

A more general post that’s certainly related is Eric Roch’s article entitled, “IBM and TIBCO Dominate SOA Software.”

All in all, quite an exciting two weeks.