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BPMS Watch - Tibco Gathering Steam in BPM

Recently I had the chance to visit Tibco's headquarters in Palo Alto for an in-depth briefing on the company and its place in the BPMS landscape.  For most people, Tibco is synonymous with message bus-based integration - the company's name stands for The Information Bus Company - but like others who have evolved from EAI, Tibco today is trying to build its reputation around BPM, SOA, and Business Optimization (i.e., BAM and analytics). Unlike most of that EAI cohort, however, Tibco has continued to grow, enjoying 14 straight quarters of year-on-year revenue growth.

My focus, naturally, is BPM, and I came away from the visit with believing Tibco has the pieces now to compete in the top tier of the BPM market. When Tibco acquired Staffware three years ago, I admit I was a doubter. Staffware, a mature human workflow product, had a good base in the UK and Australia but little US presence, and on the technology side it had no easy way to even receive a message!  Not a likely pairing for the message bus company.  And in the immediate aftermath of the acquisition, Staffware/Tibco assumed an even lower marketing profile in the US than before.

But quietly BPM at Tibco has continued to grow, and today the company estimates over 30% of its business comes from BPM.  While the core engine, now called Tibco iProcess, is largely unchanged from the Staffware product acquired in 2004, Tibco is now able to wrap a significant number of new tools and SOA infrastructure around that technology to create a compelling BPM suite.

Scalability was engineered into the iProcess engine by Staffware even before the acquisition, and Tibco maintains by that measure it is still unsurpassed in the industry, boasting 20,000 concurrent users at one customer and 3.5 million workflow transactions per day at another.  Internally the engine relies on message queues linking engine components to boost performance, and features auto-recovery and instance restart on component failures.

One of the most significant new features added by Tibco is Business Studio 2.0, which should be generally available at the end of May.  Business Studio 2.0 supports full BPMN 1.0 modeling and simulation analysis. Business Studio is free on the web, with 12,000 downloads to date of the previous partial-BPMN version. So in that respect it's like Savvion (but full BPMN). At launch it will integrate with the iProcess Designer - a different notation - via XPDL 2.0, but the real significance of Studio 2.0 is the vision that at some point in the future BPMN will become the iProcess executable design notation as well.  BPMS Watch readers know that any BPMS that uses full BPMN for both analytical modeling and executable design will get a big thumbs up from me.

Business Studio is Eclipse-based, and the key to its evolving role in Tiboc's IDE strategy is Eclipse's ability to take on different role-based perspectives or "personas." In Business Studio 2.0, the Business Analyst persona supports a palette of BPMN modeling "patterns", concept modeling in UML, rule modeling in Corticon, and simulation analysis. In that persona users can also import ARIS EPC models or simple Visio models, with transformation via xslt to XPDL, and thus to BPMN.

Business Studio's Process Architect persona lets you design executable processes without code, including the ability to introspect Tibco's service registry and bind services to process activities. (And iProcess can now send and receive messages: BusinessWorks - Tibco's ESB and service choreography engine - is exposed as a native service in iProcess!)

In the future Tibco plans to extend this idea to additonal personas creating a single Tibco IDE, delivering a consistent design experience for BPM, SOA, Business Optimization, and operational management through role-based Eclipse personas.

A second change Tibco is bringing to iProcess is a web 2.0 user experience, leveraging its General Interface tool, a leader in the Ajax RIA design space.  Unlike competitors who are using Ajax to simply create more engaging web pages, Tibco is focused on full "Ajax applications" focused on business productivity. Tibco will be leveraging these capabilities not only in BPM but in its portal, BAM, and other offerings.

Another area where Tibco has leading-edge technology is in complex event processing (CEP). CEP is a special event correlation and rule engine that seeks to anticipate problems before they occur by sensing patterns - "business events" - that have led to problems in the past, or which indicate some particular unusual thing is occurring. The CEP technology is not really integrated with BPM - it still seems on the exotic edge to me - but it could be a differentiator as predictive analytics begin to play a larger role in process management.
Finally, Tibco is looking to stand out from the pack on the basis of its new SOA infrastructure called ActiveMatrix, which provides a "distributed application server" for SOA, supporting service virtualization, governance and management... in addition to bus connectivity across heterogeneous services. It is intended to greatly reduce the complexity of managing services created on different platforms (e.g. Java vs .Net) and different programming languages across the enterprise. This is deep in the weeds of SOA infrastructure technology, but suffice it to say Tibco will look to make technology leadership in SOA a key selling point of its BPM offering, as well as the rest of the Tibco platform.

Bruce Silver

Bruce Silver (bruce[at]brsilver.com) is an independent industry analyst covering BPMS technology and the author of the 2006 BPMS Report series on bpminstitute.org. Read the BPMS Watch blog at www.brsilver.com/wordpress.

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