Tibco has acquired privately held DataSynapse for $27.7 million in a bid to boost its role in cloud computing. Tibco is a middleware supplier to financial services and other firms that is seeking to move into application management in the cloud.

About $13 million of the total was paid to satisfy DataSynapse debt obligations, according to its 8K statement on the purchase filed Aug. 24 with the SEC.

Tibco said the firm is in a quiet period after filing its 8K form with the SEC Aug. 24 and would not comment further at this time. DataSynapse is an eight-year-old supplier of software for providing a set of common services to applications running on a server cluster. DataSynapse's GridServer, for example, could distribute, monitor and manage multiple application workloads over a cluster. More recently, DataSynapse had announced that its products support Amazon Web Services and had an automated a self service capability.

Forrester Research analyst John Rymer said Tibco is making "an aggressive play" to move beyond its traditional middleware messaging role into cloud computing. In June it announced its Silver application-building platform.

Silver is intended to address deployment and governance issues of Java or C applications intended for cloud computing. For example, a Silver-built application running in Amazon's EC2 will be able to recognize demand is exceeding its current capacity and activate more application servers to meet it.

The DataSynapse product set will move Tibco beyond the capabilities of Tibco's Silver into an additional area of cloud computing. "With DataSynapse, Tibco will be able to help customers move existing applications to the cloud," instead of being restricted to just new applications, Rymer said.

Silver hasn't shipped yet. It has been available since the end of June in beta. General availability is expected sometime in early 2010, the company said at the time of its announcement.

Although initially geared to deploy applications in Amazon's cloud, Tibco's Rourke McNamara, head of product marketing, said Silver will eventually be cloud agnostic and deploy to many of the services available. "You'll flip a switch to move an application to another cloud provider," he predicted.

Tibco's flagship product, Rendevous, started as messaging middleware for Wall Street firms' trading systems in the 1980s and eventually became one of the few alternatives to IBM's MQ Series messaging system.

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