TIBCO SOA Tour

Folks in Denver ask, "Will We Still Need an ESB?"

Rourke McNamara — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 22:44:58 +0000

After hearing about TIBCO’s service container technology, some of the folks at the Denver stop on our SOA tour were curious whether or not an ESB would still be necessary if they were using ActiveMatrix. The answer is “yes,” but the reason why isn’t immediately obvious.

In a “green fields” environment where all services are deployed using TIBCO ActiveMatrix, there would be no need for an ESB. However, this is not a realistic scenario. In the real world, things are different. Most companies have a significant amount of money invested in existing applications and services. In the majority of cases, moving these applications to ActiveMatrix won’t make sense. Further, not all companies are ready to adopt a service container strategy at the enterprise level. In such cases, ActiveMatrix will exist within a business unit or a department, but an ESB will be required to connect to services in other departments.

A product like TIBCO BusinessWorks will allow for complex service composition and orchestration, while a product like the forthcoming TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus will allow for the easy and rapid onboarding of services to the ActiveMatrix Service Grid.

Why Write Extra Code?

Rourke McNamara — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:05:48 +0000

On June 13th, I presented ActiveMatrix to a large group of interested people in Chicago. Many of the folks attending were not existing TIBCO customers and were not familiar with ActiveMatrix. As a result, the agenda was a little different and focused on explaining the need for a service container in service development.

The notion of a container that allows developers to focus on writing business logic and not building out communications and plumbing code was something that really hit home with the attendees. It is well accepted that web application frameworks provide real value in reducing the amount of code developers need to write when building a web application. A service container — like ActiveMatrix Service Grid — takes that idea one step further and removes the need to write code that is common to all services and service based applications. Further, ActiveMatrix is not specific to Java, but but provides users with these benefits across multiple development languages.

Perhaps the single biggest chunk of functionality needed for building services and service based applications is communications functionality. A service needs to be wrapped in communications code so it can be invoked, and that service needs to be able to invoke other services in order to operate. A service container must make all of this as easy for the developer as possible.

ActiveMatrix Service Grid goes beyond simply providing a SOAP stack and abstracts away all of the communications-related plumbing. A service deployed on the Grid can invoke another service via a single line of code without knowing what the transport or communications protocol required will be. Grid-based services can be moved without any code or configuration changes to either the services themselves, or the services that reuse them.

The folks in Chicago were very excitied and many requested follow-up meetings to see TIBCO’s revolutionary service container in action.

The SOA Bus Stops in Palo Alto

Rourke McNamara — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:48:43 +0000

On the 12th of June, TIBCO held a Bus Stop Tour event just down the street from our worldwide headquarters. We chose the Stanford Park Hotel on El Camino, and it turned out to be a great venue with an exceptional catered breakfast. As a bonus, Raghu Thiagarajan, the Director of Product Management for ActiveMatrix, was able to join us and give an extended roadmap presentation to the folks able to attend.

The attendess– particularly those who were not already TIBCO customers — were very eager to understand whether or not we intended for customers to move existing Java EE applications to our service container. That’s an interesting question, and one that I hadn’t sufficiently explained in my presentation. ActiveMatrix Service Grid (AMSG) is a distributed service container that provides great benefits to folks building services and services based applications. However, there’s not much benefit to running a monolithic application or monolithic web applications inside AMSG. New applications written using the SOA paradigm should be deployed in a service containers, but existing applications should probably not be moved from the environment in which they’re running today.

Rather than rewriting those existing applications to follow a services model, we typically advise customers to build a “services layer” that allows access to the parts of those applications that other applications require connectivity to.

SOA Bus Tour hits the US

Rourke McNamara — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 18:15:08 +0000

After a short break for a very successful TUCON 2007, the SOA Bus Stop Tour has arrived in the US. Over the last few weeks, Jeff Kristick, Rob Meyer, and I have introduced ActiveMatrix to existing TIBCO customers and prospects in a number of different American cities. In addition to dedicated “Bus Stop” events, we’ve also taken this presentation to the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit, where Thierry Schang presented a 30 minute introduction to service containers. Thierry was followed on stage by Bret Martin of Delta, who did a fantastic job explaining the benefit that ActiveMatrix has brought Delta, TIBCO’s first customer to go live with ActiveMatrix Service Grid.

Two things have changed since the EMEA portion of the Bus Stop Tour. ActiveMatrix has been out for over six months and is now deployed in production situations, and many of our customers were introduced to ActiveMatrix at TUCON. As a result, we’ve invited a much larger percentage of partners to the Bus Stop events in the US. Those prospects have a very different perspective on TIBCO and ActiveMatrix than do out customers, and that has resulted in some great feedback and some great conversations.

Over the next few blog posts, we’ll talk about just those interactions as the TIBCO Bus Stop Tour makes its way across North America.

The Double Decker Bus Tour in London â€“ Two Different Views of SOA

Rob Meyer — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:55:22 +0000

TheÂ Bus TourÂ recentlyÂ stopped inÂ the center of London, at the SoHo Hotel. There were around 100 customers and partners, with customers in the morning and partners in the afternoon. We also had Neil Macehiter of Macehiter Ward-Dutton speak before me. Despite my having to follow a great speaker and do two full conferences, I enjoyed the combination. Part of the reason was that it highlighted the many different views on SOA. Perhaps it was appropriate that we hosted the sessions in one of the main screening rooms in London where they review new films.

Business and IT clearly have different views. No one likes to hear “aligning Business with IT” on its own. But Neil clearly brought out the difference between IT and the business. He really understands the needs of the business and is also very technical. He has a great definition of service virtualization, and was one of the first to really understand it. And he knows that business and IT can be worlds apart, especially when it comes to SOA. It seemed like everyone understood Neil’s explanation on why this alignment is critical, and governance is a good answer.

There are also the different experiences of our customers and systems integrators. In the case of the customers, the majority were on their first project or getting started. The rest were mainly early adopters. There were only a few who hadn’t started on SOA. People were all asking about the technologies. But I got several questions from the early stage SOA adopters about planning and best practices. The next most common set of questions were about how to implement governance.

In the case of the systems integrators who were there, most had been implementing SOA for several years now. Because they had already encountered some of the challenges with larger scale SOA, they tended to be interested not only in governance, but in testing, deployment and service virtualization.

Regardless of the different experiences and perspectives, everyone was committed to SOA, even those who hadn’t yet started. That’s definitely a change even from a year ago.

SOA Reality Check

Jeff Kristick — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:40:51 +0000

I just returned from Johannesburg, South Africa and I can tell you one thing for sure - 30+ hours of travel is never much fun. Travel time aside, it was a great trip and South Africa is a beautiful country. I had a couple customer meetings on Monday and then we hosted an event on Tuesday for customers, prospects and partners. I am a big fan of audience participation (it helps to keep them awake!), so I took a survey of the audience when I started my presentation - asking them how far along the SOA journey they were. Out of the 100 people less than 10 said they had active projects. The majority of the group said they were just starting to research it to understand how it fits into their business. They were forming working groups and looking for information on how and where to get started.

The audience was a bit skeptical of all the SOA hype, which is expected given all the noise being made in the market. A gentleman in the audience made a great point (it was masked in a rhetorical question) and one that I think IT buyers and vendors often underestimate. He asked what role SOA played in helping IT work with business. Does SOA magically enable IT to better understand business requirements, properly develop specifications for business applications, deliver them according to those plans (on time and on budget) and make the business users happy? No! SOA does not magically do that and frankly no software or technology can magically do that. SOA is not meant to replace the process of IT working with business. Some people argue the gap between business and IT is widening, while others say the opposite. Regardless, business and IT need to work together to address market opportunities and challenges, but where does SOA fit in. SOA is an architectural paradigm that when implemented correctly can provide more flexibility and efficiency to IT and ultimately (and hopefully) enable them to deliver projects to the business faster and cheaper. It is not rocket science, some argue it is not new, but it is real and can deliver results.

IT vendors are guilty of marketing the next big thing, and trying to make it into the panacea of all problems (business, IT, or any combination). SOA can facilitate greater collaboration between business and IT, but the framework of collaboration needs to be in place and is more important than any software you can buy from an IT vendor. I encourage buyers to be skeptical and make sure they have the right frameworks and processes in place, and then turn to technology to make them more efficient and flexible. Don’t turn to SOA or any technology just because it seems like the next big thing.

Next week we have several more stops in Europe, including Lisbon, Stockholm, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam. That will conclude our EMEA Tour and it will pick back up in North America in mid-April.

Cheers,
Jeff

SOA wasn’t built in a day

Jeff Kristick — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 16:14:33 +0000

We just finished the first part of the SOA Bus Stop Tour and the final location was beautiful Rome. It was another well attended and highly interactive session at a great location. We held the event at the Museo dell’ Ara Pacis. We had about 50 guests in attendance and it was a good mix of customers, prospects and partners. My top takeaway from this event and the entire Bus Stop Tour is summed up in the title (and it makes a pithy one). Time and time again people talked about their journey to SOA. They are consistently moving past the small pilots and past departmental projects and starting larger scale enterprise projects. They are realizing significant benefits in their projects and consistently talk about delivering greater flexibility to the business at a lower cost to IT. But there are complications and key learnings along the way. Some are related to technology (heterogeneous environments, scale, service management …) and others represent the “softer side” of SOA (who owns a service, who pays for it, what does the organization look like …). We have been on the road talking about our new products (ActiveMatrix) and our new services, which are designed to help companies achieve SOA success faster. It has been refreshing to hear from customers, prospects and partners that we have built the right products and surrounded them with the right services to help them on their path to SOA. It won’t happen overnight or in one single project, and SOA does not come in a box. But, it is very real and people are moving to it at a faster pace and with solid results.

The first phase of the Tour is complete. We did events in six cities throughout Europe in 10 days. Along the way we met with key customers, prospects, partners, and industry analysts. It has been a very busy two weeks for the entire team, and very rewarding. We are taking a couple weeks off, and then we will be back on the road. Next stop is London on March 8th and then Johannesburg, Madrid, Lisbon, Rotterdam, Brussels, and Stockholm. From there we will head to North America in April. Look for TIBCO in a city near you.

A Love Affair with SOA in Paris

Rob Meyer — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:33:33 +0000

No worldwide Bus Tour is complete without Paris around Valentine’s Day. France has always had a passion for software, and clearly France has a big love affair with SOA. Several hundred SOA experts from companies and systems integrators gathered, listened and networked in France’s museum of Cinema, the Cinematheque Francais.

Cyril Dhenin, a well known French journalist, spent over one hour interviewing Jean-Christophe Lalanne, the general director of information systems at Air France, about Air France-KLM’s enterprise SOA initiative to support their merger and strategic initiatives. It’s a great example of SOA that recently was the cover story for one of the top IT magazines in France, O1 Informatique. Air France has been service-oriented for nearly a decade, and has 2000 services. They are moving these services onto BusinessWorks as their corporate ESB, in part to support the Air France-KLM merger. Mr. Lalanne discussed in detail some of the reasons why: adopt standards, align IT with the business, increase service reuse, and improve IT flexibility to leverage new initiatives and outside services.

ActiveMatrix was another hot topic during the conference. That’s partly because the ActiveMatrix Service Grid translates to “Grille de Service”, or Service Grill. I learned when Cyril and others insisted I speak part of the time in French, which I gladly did. Governance was also a hot topic, especially for several of the early adopters. In our one-on-one conversations with several of the early adopters, governance was very important in 2007. They were also worried about the future direction about BusinessWorks with the launch of ActiveMatrix. So explaining how BusinessWorks is and will continue to be our ESB, and how it works with ActiveMatrix was very important to them.

Overall the Paris Bus Tour was a great event: great conversations with great technologists over great food and culture. There is no better combination!

Busy Day in Milan

Jeff Kristick — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:35:34 +0000

We spent the day in Milan and it was filled with a full slate of meetings. This is the 5th stop on the Bus Stop Tour, but my first. The day started with us meeting an existing TIBCO customer to brief them on our SOA vision and the ActiveMatrix products. This customer is a shared IT group for two major companies here in Italy and has been a TIBCO customer for several years. To give you an idea of scale, they have over 150 instances of our SAP adapter in production and over 100 instances of TIBCO BusinessWorks in production. TIBCO is their integration backbone. But, SOA is relatively new to them and they are just finishing their first couple pilot projects. The learned a lot during the pilots and the key pain points for them were governance and additional complexity. The project took longer than they expected because of these issues, but they were still a success. My Italian is not so good, so I presented in English. There was a lot of head nodding during the presentation, but I am never sure if key points get lost in translation. At the end of the presentation it was very refreshing when a lead architect started to take over the conversation. He clearly saw the value of ActiveMatrix and how it could fit into their SOA plans. He also appreciated that TIBCO knows that governance is more than just a technology problem. They are already looking at organization structure and a competency center to help on the next SOA project. All in all it was a good first meeting.

Next I connected with Massimo Pezzini from Gartner. It had been a while since we briefed him on our SOA story so we spent a solid two hours chatting. We spent a good deal of time talking about the competitive landscape and how ActiveMatrix is putting TIBCO in a unique position. I think Massimo was happy with my update, but it is always hard to tell. Industry analysts probably make good poker places as they have great poker faces.

From that meeting I went straight to the marketing event. It was at the Terrazza Martini, which is on the top floor of a building in downtown Milan. The view was amazing and I will be sure to post a picture soon. We had about 30 customers, and partners there - a nice size crowd for this topic. The majority were BusinessWorks customers and they quickly understood how ActiveMatrix fit together. The technical discussion of the new products was handled by Gianluca Zincani (TIBCO Solution Consultant) and was in Italian - that made a big difference for the crowd. A good number stayed around for the reception afterward and there were plenty of questions and good comments about the content. People really got the concept of virtualization and the Service Grid. The ideas of making service reuse a reality and saving developer’s time really resonated.
Next stop is in Rome tomorrow and then we take a break for a couple weeks.

On to Frankfurt

Rourke McNamara — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 23:59:59 +0000

Frankfurt ended up being the smallest stop of the week, but it was also the most interactive of the sessions so far. Because the audience was smaller, we encouraged folks to ask questions during the presentation. We got a bit more than we were hoping for — the session lasted over four hours instead of the two and a half we’d planned for.

Why was the session so much smaller in Frankfurt? A good part of that is likely due to the fact that we ran from meeting to meeting in Frankfurt briefing some of our strategic customers in that city at their offices rather than requiring that their entire teams make the trek down to our event. Meeting with these customers one on one gave us the opportunity to talk specifically about how ActiveMatrix fits with their current SOA strategy and how it fits into their current projects.

Much of the discussion on Thursday turned back to one central theme: customers in Frankfurt wanted to know how ActiveMatrix Service Grid could fit into their existing projects and how they should change their current approach to make migrating their services to this container less painful when they do choose to adopt it. These folks were really keen on ActiveMatrix.

One thing that folks in Frankfurt really got was the service virtualization capability in ActiveMatrix. Many people commented on the fact that they were trying to build similar functionality on top of ESB products (like TIBCO BusinessWorks) but wanted to buy such functionality in an out-of-the-box product. I think that notion is really key. You could build a service virtualization platform on top of ESB and messaging products, but you could also build you own database server or spreadsheet application.

ActiveMatrix frees IT development organizations to focus on enabling business initiatives and providing unique value to their organizations rather than building software and infrastructure.

Frankfurt was a great event that truly allowed us to interact with some very sophisticated customers at a deep level. The exchange of ideas continued until after 9pm and truly made for a memorable event.