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From: Lilly on 24 Jan 2007 12:13
I'd like to know what are their most interesting products.

I just downloaded the BusinessWork brochure, the product seems to do
almost everything (:-)
but then il looks somehow another hype on SOA ...


Any info on really used products / projects ?


Thankyou

From: Patrick May on 26 Jan 2007 11:43
"Lilly" <lavlavoro(a)yahoo.it> writes:
> I'd like to know what are their most interesting products.
>
> I just downloaded the BusinessWork brochure, the product seems to do
> almost everything (:-)
> but then il looks somehow another hype on SOA ...
>
> Any info on really used products / projects ?

TIB/Rendezvous (their basic publish/subscribe messaging
middleware) is pretty cool. All the rest seems to be outside their
domain of expertise.[*] ;-)

Regards,

Patrick

[*] Tip of the hat to my former colleagues at TIBCO. I kid because I
love.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
S P Engineering, Inc. | Large scale, mission-critical, distributed OO
| systems design and implementation.
pjm(a)spe.com | (C++, Java, Common Lisp, Jini, middleware, SOA)
From: Daniel Parker on 27 Jan 2007 11:23

On Jan 26, 11:43 am, Patrick May <p...(a)spe.com> wrote:
> "Lilly" <lavlav...(a)yahoo.it> writes:
> > I'd like to know what are their most interesting products.
>
> > I just downloaded the BusinessWork brochure, the product seems to do
> > almost everything (:-)
> > but then il looks somehow another hype on SOA ...
>
> > Any info on really used products / projects ? TIB/Rendezvous (their basic publish/subscribe messaging
> middleware) is pretty cool. All the rest seems to be outside their domain of expertise.[*] ;-)
>
> [*] Tip of the hat to my former colleagues at TIBCO. I kid because I love.
>
I'm a little curious about this comment, since by your last comment I
take it that you have an inside track.

I've a lot more experience with TIB/RV than the rest of the product
line, but I've participated in two BW evaluations, at two wholesale
financial institutions, both of which selected it as a data
integration tool. It seems to be a reasonable product, albeit a
little expensive. One of the companies chose to use BW over TIBCO
EMS, and the other BW over IBM MQ. Both options work, although EMS
appears orders of magnitude faster than MQ (still much slower than RV,
of course.) What sells BW to the business is its user interfaces for
assembling simple work flows for data integration, and it seems to be
well ahead of the competition here. A couple of the big Wall Street
firms have standardized on it, and they report back that it's not
magic, but it does work. Now, I suspect that some of you are thinking
that software this expensive had better work, but in the rareified
enterprise world of high end tooling, this often comes as a pleasant
surprise. (IBM's new product in this space doesn't work at all, but
then of course WebSphere didn't work very well either for a couple of
years, so just like with WebSphere, one would expect them to someday
get it together.)

I guess this is really off topic, unless we can pull Lahman into the
discussion, on the subject of how it is that the tooling that is
emerging for designing work flows in an interactive fashion is _not_
going the executable UML route :-)

Daniel Parker
http://servingxml.sourceforge.net/





From: Patrick May on 27 Jan 2007 12:22
"Daniel Parker" <danielaparker(a)gmail.com> writes:
> On Jan 26, 11:43 am, Patrick May <p...(a)spe.com> wrote:
>> "Lilly" <lavlav...(a)yahoo.it> writes:
>> > I'd like to know what are their most interesting products.
>>
>> > I just downloaded the BusinessWork brochure, the product seems to do
>> > almost everything (:-)
>> > but then il looks somehow another hype on SOA ...
>>
>> > Any info on really used products / projects ? TIB/Rendezvous
>> (their basic publish/subscribe messaging middleware) is pretty
>> cool. All the rest seems to be outside their domain of
>> expertise.[*] ;-)
>>
>> [*] Tip of the hat to my former colleagues at TIBCO. I kid because I love.
>>
> I'm a little curious about this comment, since by your last comment
> I take it that you have an inside track.

I wouldn't describe it quite that way, but I did work on a large
project as a subcontractor for TIBCO professional services as a
consultant for several years. I've stayed in touch with some of the
people there and have also continued to work with TIBCO products,
albeit less intensively. As you no doubt well know, TIBCO is nearly
ubiquitous in large companies, particularly in the financial services
industry.

> I've a lot more experience with TIB/RV than the rest of the product
> line, but I've participated in two BW evaluations, at two wholesale
> financial institutions, both of which selected it as a data
> integration tool. It seems to be a reasonable product, albeit a
> little expensive. One of the companies chose to use BW over TIBCO
> EMS, and the other BW over IBM MQ. Both options work, although EMS
> appears orders of magnitude faster than MQ (still much slower than
> RV, of course.) What sells BW to the business is its user
> interfaces for assembling simple work flows for data integration,
> and it seems to be well ahead of the competition here. A couple of
> the big Wall Street firms have standardized on it, and they report
> back that it's not magic, but it does work.

That's an accurate summary. To explain my previous comment, I
often joked with my TIBCO colleagues that all the products went
downhill after TIB/Rendezvous. RV is one of far too few commercial
middleware products that does exactly what it claims on the box. It's
fast, it's solid, and it's non-intrusive. If you want to do pure
publish/subscribe messaging, it's hard to beat.

In response to customer demands, TIBCO created variants of RV to
provide certified and guaranteed messaging. These products provide
guaranteed, one-and-only-once, in-order, and other delivery options
not available in basic pub/sub. While they work, they do so at a cost
in performance and complexity. Unfortunately, adding these
capabilities to pub/sub also eliminates some of the key benefits,
including anonymous, asynchronous communication. This isn't a failure
on TIBCO's part, it's inherent in the concepts. That was the basis
for my needling of the TIBCO employees I worked with.

As far as BusinessWorks is concerned, it is in an almost
completely different problem domain than TIB/Rendezvous. TIBCO's
first foray into the workflow area was IntegrationManager. BW made
some significant improvements over IM, particularly in support for
multi-threading. BW does provide some value in adding a
business-level view of processes implemented via RV messages and, as
you pointed out, it does work. In my experience, however, it is not
suitable for high performance, low latency environments (although it
may be useful to integrate HPC components within larger workflows).

There are certainly widely used tools out there that are more
difficult to integrate with than BW.

> I guess this is really off topic, unless we can pull Lahman into the
> discussion, on the subject of how it is that the tooling that is
> emerging for designing work flows in an interactive fashion is _not_
> going the executable UML route :-)

That would be interesting.

Regards,

Patrick

------------------------------------------------------------------------
S P Engineering, Inc. | Large scale, mission-critical, distributed OO
| systems design and implementation.
pjm(a)spe.com | (C++, Java, Common Lisp, Jini, middleware, SOA)
 | 
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