Tibco Steps Up Integration Competition With IBM

This story has been corrected. An earlier version said DataExchange was part of the ObjectStar International Ltd. acquisition.

In an effort to sharpen its competitive edge against IBM's integration product lineup, which will soon include Ascential Software Corp., Tibco Software Inc. this week introduced a new data-integration tool. The move comes two weeks after Tibco expanded its product line by acquiring an application-integration software vendor.

This week, Tibco unveiled DataExchange, which it says is designed to perform the same data extraction, transformation, and loading, or ETL, functions that Ascential's software provides. "IBM looks like it's playing catch-up. We've already got a product available," says Aiaz Kazi, Tibco's general manager of business integration. Tibco is leveraging Embarcadero Technologies Inc.'s DT/Studio product, which lets businesses design, integrate, and manage enterprise apps and their underlying databases and data. DataExchange is an extension to Tibco's BusinessWorks integration platform, which integrates disparate systems within a company's software infrastructure.

Extraction, transformation, and loading software such as DataExchange collects data from disparate sources, scrubs it to eliminate nonessential elements, and recasts it into the appropriate format so it can be shared among enterprise applications and systems. DataExchange is priced at $50,000 per CPU and is available immediately.

Tibco acquired ObjectStar International Ltd., a privately held firm that offers mainframe application-integration tools, on March 9. The acquisition "further enhances our real-time business-infrastructure offering and positions us to more effectively compete with IBM," Tibco chairman Vivek Ranadive said in a statement.

Being able to handle mainframe data natively on the mainframe rather than through outside connections to the mainframe will put Tibco in a better position to compete with IBM for mainframe-integration business, Kazi says. "We've always done integration based on connectivity with the mainframe," he says. "Now we're on the mainframe, performing native integration."