TIBCO software moves into hardware

The web services software vendor TIBCO has unveiled a major new strategic direction for its product portfolio with its first hardware appliance, specifically designed to accelerate the capabilities and performance of its Rendezvous messaging software.

The company said it had developed its first hardware product after engineering as much performance from the messaging software running on commodity servers as possible.

The announcement late yesterday met with an enthusiastic response at the vendor's US customer conference currently taking place in San Francisco, as Denny Page, TIBCO chef engineer, told delegates the appliance would help manage "an explosion of events in enterprises," with better, more competitive response times.

Page said the new P-7500 box would answer requests from customers who operate in environments where microsecond latency for processing mission-critical data can affect levels of competitiveness - in financial services' algorithmic trading platforms for example.

He added that the box could reduce the amount of server space required to run the Rendezvous software by a 10-to-1 ratio, cutting data centre power consumption, while optimising space and resource requirements.

The software vendor has turned to specialist messaging hardware vendor Solace Systems to achieve tight integration between the hardware and software in order to offer faster, more resilient application-to-application communications without any code changes to existing applications already handled by Rendezvous.

Rourke McNamara, TIBCO's head of marketing for SOA, told IT PRO it took the opportunity to design a highly tuned appliance "from the ground up" with Solace, but that TIBCO would retain full responsibility for support.

"We have designed everything in the appliance to handle Rendezvous, from the chips to even burning it into the firmware," he said. "If you look inside, it doesn't look anything like a generic Dell server. In fact it looks more like a switch for the messaging data. We'd gone as far as we could with the software alone."

McNamara refused to go into detail about future hardware-related strategy, and would not rule out the possibility of releasing more appliance-based product releases in future, saying that customers had expressed an interest in other dedicated kit to run their TIBCO systems on.

The first P-7500 units are expected to ship later this year in September, though pricing has yet to be announced.

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