TIBCO cosies up to Silverlight, Atrium and India

TIBCO, the web services and service oriented architecture (SOA) software maker late yesterday announced strategic alliances with Microsoft, business service management (BSM) vendor, BMC and Infosys at its annual user conference in San Francisco.

The Microsoft tie up will see TIBCO use its rival to Adobe's Flash to complement the SOA vendor's AJAX strategy. It said it would use Silverlight where the need for extremely rich browser-based interactions would complement what can be done using the Java-based web programming language.

Matt Quinn, TIBCO senior vice president of engineering and technology strategies, said the vendor believed Silverlight would deliver the best user experience, while providing "an extremely rich set" of authoring and developer tools.

"This means we get the best experience in the shortest time to market which is great for our customers," he said. "What's more, Silverlight enhances our overall user experience product strategy by taking advantage of existing .NET developer skills. It is modern, light, developers love it and it holds great market potential."

Rourke McNamara, TIBCO's director of SOA Product Marketing, said that although it had to develop in maturity, the plug-in commitment was just one part of a deepening relationship with Microsoft. "We have a number of engineers working with Silverlight already and you can expect to see the results in later releases," he said.

The vendor also announced its Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation to enable Microsoft .NET Framework services and applications to communicate using TIBCO's enterprise message service (EMS) platform more easily, for increased reliability and scalability.

At the same time, it also said it would improve the install footprint of its SOA ActiveMatrix platform with an agreement for BMC to embed it into the BSM vendor's Atrium platform.

Robert Beauchamp, BMC president and chief executive, told TIBCO delegates that IT was suffering from under-investment in its own systems, having worked for many years to facilitate application functionality and integration for every other line of business.

"You may have heard the saying that it's always the cobbler's children in the village that get new shoes last," he said, adding that the time was right for the IT function to start taking advantage of the connectivity and application management capabilities SOA had facilitated in other business areas.

TIBCO also announced it had expanded its existing, eight-year relationship with Infosys by opening a new competency centre in Bangalore to demonstrate the benefit of frameworks and accelerators developed by the IT outsourcer to exploit the SOA vendor's software portfolio.

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