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.

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 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. 

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.