TUCON2011

Last week TUCON2011 took place in Las Vegas, USA. As we are the only TIBCO partner, with its HQ in Belgium, Integr8 Consulting could not be absent this year! So together with my colleague, we went out to the far-west of the USA.

This year TUCON started with the keynote speakers and the BIG idea track. The focus of these BIG idea tracks is to hear from TIBCO customers and TIBCO visionaries, how they are using TIBCO technologies and how it provides them with the 2-second advantage. For those out there not knowing what the 2-second advantage is, here is a link to a video from Vivek (TIBCO CEO) explaining the 2-second advantage.

Putting the right information on the right time in the right context

These are my 4 keywords I remember from my TUCON visit:

• Tibbr 
• Context 
• Silver 
• Mobility

If it’s one thing that is clear, TIBCO is investing a lot in its social computing tool, tibbr. Tibbr is a tool; build specific for the work-space, which will allow you to follow subjects, applications and event streams. Using this approach it will be possible to put the information you receive, directly in the right context when and where you want it.

This brings me to the second keyword, context. One of the keynote speakers stated ‘what if you have a million of data events, but you can’t place it’. And that’s what it’s all about. If you can place the data at the right time in the right context, it will provide you with a 2-second advantage.

The third keyword is Silver. Silver is TIBCO’s brand name for its cloud services like you have ActiveMatrix for the SOA/BPM platform. Next to Tibbr, Silver will become a focus point for the future. You will get Silver Mobile, Silver Fabric, Silver Spotfire and many more. All providing you with Cloud services to start with Tibco technology in just a matter of seconds (at least in theory).

Now the fourth option will look a bit strange but this might become the biggest shifting of enterprise communication since the rise of the email (maybe a bit exaggerated) . With the upcoming boost of the smartphones, ipads, smart devices (like smart grid readers, which read your electricity usages, and send it to your electricity provider), new technologies are needed that will make it possible to use your mobile device as…. well as a workstation. If you’re interested on how Silver Mobile will work:

• Silver Mobile will provide you with a platform that runs on your Android, iPhone or BlackBerry. Using the platform, you will receive a common API that you can use in your mobile framework (jQuery Mobile, etc…) when building your own app
• Using Silver Fabric you can push, from the cloud, your apps to the Silver Mobile platform on your company’s iphones, blackberries, or androids.
• The example shown on TUCON was showing the status of your BW applications on your iphone. In case something went down, you got a notification using the native notification bus from your mobile device.

In the sessions of Orange, we saw a M2M (Machine-2-Machine) example on how Orange is using mobile communication technology. Now imagine about the possibilities when you think again about ‘context’. You can analyze the date from a mobile device and correlate this context with build in embedded devices like GPS, etc… to provide you with … the context of the data.
To conclude, enterprises will have to adapt their architectures to provide more and more a context-aware mobility delivery architecture in order to ‘please’ there customers.

Announcements

Next to the BIG idea tracks, day 2 and 3 are technology tracks that provided us with some insights of the current developments done by TIBCO. Now I will start this chapter, like TIBCO started each session. Every information provided is purely informational and does not legally bound us / TIBCO to any delivery

I tried to follow a diverse schema trying to know as much as I can and these are the things that are still in my mind:

• The ActiveMatrix platform will be extended with a rule engine, TIBCO ActiveMatrix Decisions. This product is build based on BusinessEvents and exposes it rules as services which can be used for example in a BPM process of ActiveMatrix BPM
• TIBCO ActiveSpaces 2.0 data grid. Woow, was I overwhelmed with this technology. To be honest, I didn’t really know this technology, but from what I’ve seen on TUCON, I immediately want to start with it!
• BusinessWorks plugins. Instead of adapter based technology, TIBCO is coming more and more with external plugins that can enhance BusinessWorks. Examples are tibbr, SalesForce, ActiveSpaces and an Aspect plugin that you could use for AOP programming in BW!
• Hawk! What Hawk?? Yes indeed, Hawk is coming with a nice web interface that will provide you with a better overview of your TIBCO Administrative domains. And as most products will do, Hawk will also integrate with Tibbr and maybe Spotfire in the future.
• Nimbus. This newly acquired technology provides you with a tool that can be used for documenting your business processes in a way your business can understand them. Don’t see it as an automation engine but rather as a tool for documenting (discovering) your business process. If TIBCO will connect AMX BPM and Nimbus, information is exchanged between them, it might become a strong product bundle.
• TIBCO EMS / FTL. During the engineering roundtable, it came to a discussion on how the future will look like for messaging. In the end there is no real answer. EMS is still the messaging solution if you want a guaranteed reliable messaging solution. FTL is the future for TIBCO if it concerns really fast messaging.

If you visited TUCON this year, maybe you joined some other sessions and got other ideas then myself. Please share your experiences. By sharing information and putting it in the right context, we can get that 2-second advantage!

Author: Günther