TIBCO Integration Consultancy Session: BusinessWorks™ 6.x

On the 8th of October 2015 TIBCO Netherlands gave a presentation about the present and the future of its main integration software product. All the Dutch TIBCO partners were invited to attend this consultancy session. The expectations of the TIBCO partners were high and that was confirmed also by the amount of people that attended this consultancy session. Due to the large number of participants the consultancy session took place in Utrecht instead of Rotterdam, where the TIBCO Netherlands venue is. Six of our consultants attended this event.

Past, Present and Future

TIBCO confirmed that their most important integration software product still is TIBCO BusinessWorks™. For BusinessWorks™ 5.x (current version is 5.13), TIBCO is commited to release improvements and new features. Support services for their 5.x version is foreseen for years to come.

So far TIBCO released several versions of TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks™ 6.x (from now on we will call it BW 6) and TIBCO will work hard to provide new updates and improvements to make BW 6 its new flagship integration product.

We are committed to provide valuable feedback to further improve the product, to validate that it’s up to the job in real world projects and to train its consultants and get them BW 6 certified.

Since the first release of BW 6 (February 2014) several versions were released, with the current version being BW 6.2.2. On the road map is the plan to update Business Studio to use Eclipse version 4 (at the moment BW 6.2.2 is built on Eclipse 3.7.2). Definitely BW 6 represents the future of the integration software from TIBCO. All the efforts are in the direction to provide a solid, versatile and flexible integration platform.

What does BW6 offer more than BW5?

BW 6 embraces different focus areas like:

1. Messaging: in addition to the existing messaging capabilities (i.e. RV and EMS) a new lightweight messaging protocol has been added (i.e. FTL (Faster Than Light))
2. Monitoring: in addition to TIBCO Hawk, LogLogic has been added
3. Large Scale and Deployment: integration with TIBCO Silver Fabric and the use of native plug-ins in Eclipse (e.g. Maven and BWTest) for Continuous Deployment
4. Governance, Security and API Management: there is a possibility to handle policy directory and to have access to BW API
5. Open source: it’s built on the OSGi platform, Business Studio is based on the Eclipse IDE and it provides a BW 6 Plug-in Development Kit so anyone can extend BW 6

TIBCO BW 6 offers all the existing capabilities of TIBCO BW 5 with a focus towards the Web Oriented Architecture, the cloud and the mobile world.

Moreover the approach of TIBCO is to pay more attention to the feedback coming from the partner community and improve the product as much as possible, in order to give it a better position on the market. From this point of view TIBCO planned a new version of the TIBCO Community to better harvest feedback, suggestions and bugs/issues reported by the TIBCO partners.

Conclusion

We started to work with BW 6, with training and concrete projects in the United Kingdom and Czech Republic. The feedback is positive and we will continue to invest and improve our expertise on this new integration platform. More updates and blog posts will come soon, so stay tuned!