Tibco Announces Silver Application-Building Platform

Tibco Software on Wednesday launched an application-building platform aimed at speeding enterprise entry into cloud computing by building self-awareness into the cloud application.

Tibco Silver is meant to resolve governance issues as an application is assembled for export to the cloud. The platform supplies "self-aware" elasticity into the application so that it recognizes spikes and troughs in demand, and taps cloud resources accordingly, explained Rourke McNamara, head of product marketing, in an interview.

Tibco is moving beyond its base of its flagship messaging system, Rendezvous, and service-oriented architecture ActiveMatrix product line to add a new element to the cloud: Tibco's complex event processing system. Complex event processing can look at a chain of software events over a defined time frame and determine whether they are normal or abnormal, according to previously defined parameters. Departures from the norm can be used to trigger appropriate responses.

Tibco Silver applies CEP to applications intended to be shipped off to Amazon EC2 and other clouds. "Silver allows application elasticity without any human intervention. No other offering does that today," said McNamara.

The same CEP capability allows a Silver-built cloud application to recognize when it's in danger of not meeting service-level agreements and fire up more instances to ensure proper user response times.

Silver also simplifies cloud application construction by allowing its user to assemble a cloud application from different language parts, much as a composite application might be assembled for an SOA. Cloud applications can be built from Java, C++, or Ruby on Rails. Tibco will also support Microsoft's .Net and SpringSource's Spring Framework applications.

Tibco provides a development environment into which existing code can be imported, combined as a composite application, and deployed to the cloud with a click of a mouse. Although Amazon EC2 is an initial target, Tibco plans to have a pull-down menu of target cloud environments, such as RackSpace or a telecom company cloud, said McNamara.

VMware is a Tibco partner in producing Silver, with management components of its vSphere 4 environment built into the application building platform. Part of Silver is based on ActiveMatrix components, McNamara acknowledged.

Although Amazon runs cloud applications as a set of virtualized files built to its specification for an Amazon Machine Image, McNamara said Tibco will include virtualized file formats for alternative clouds in the future. "You'll flip a switch to move an application to another cloud provider," he predicted.

Silver will be available in beta form at the end of June. It is not expected to be generally available before early 2010, McNamara said.

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