This is my first article on TIBCO NOW 2014.

Again this year, I was sent as a technology observer by my employer (Logimethods) to assess the new product line and business orientations of TIBCO.

This year was a great one.

The TIBCO folks have improved and refined their orientations on a handful of their core topics : Integration, Analytics, Data Management (second article on the way), and revamped their product line in a massive (good !) way (third article on the way).

Before I start writing on all these turn of events, I want to start by answering many of my colleagues & clients questions about the TIBCO product line. These were gathered in the weeks/days prior to the conference.

How many clients currently in production with BusinessWorks 6 ?

According to the product manager: Somewhere between 20 and 40.

What about the future of AMX Service Grid vs BusinessWorks 6 ?
Is BW6 the go-to product for SOA ?

An important TIBCO executive called Service Grid a “narrow field product”.
From a sales perspective, for new projects, BW6 is considered the way to go.

The whole conference was REALLY BusinessWorks 6 oriented, and all Hands-on activities were full. The product seems very well designed, and as been tested intensively (both inside and outside TIBCO) for a long time.
As I will detail (in another article), BW6 takes what is best in many TIBCO products, and delivers a platform that can do much of was Service Grid and BusinessWorks 5 were doing.
BW 6.2 coming out this month, and should be the new go-to version.

Service Grid will continue to be supported for a significant (undisclosed) time.
Note : Service Grid as recently been rebranded on the TIBCO site as a SOA Development product (read : not ESB)

What is the future of BWSE ?What of the migration from BWSE or BW5 to BW6 ?

If the BWSE was “unwired” (read : not Service or Reference SCA chevrons), then the conversion is as simple as with any BW5 projects.

Wired BWSE will be more work.
As of now, the claim made is that the migration tools cover about 95% of the migration work automatically.

When will TIBCO commit to a unified & modern administration console for all their product ?

NOW !

TEA is already the new administrator for BusinessWorks 6, but TIBCO have concrete plans to use it for all their products.

I have seen it used or had confirmation of support for : BusinessWorks 6, Business Events, EMS (read-only for now), Policy Director 2.0, Hawk, SPM , Security Server (a new component to be release with TEA 2.0)

There are rumours of BPM eventually making the jump too.

What are Vista’s plans for TIBCO after acquisition ?

We received a (rather good) sales pitch on Vista:
Vista is concentrating on acquiring good or great software companies, and making them even better.
They have been around for 14 years and never lost money on an acquisition.
Due to the size of their portfolio (soon to include TIBCO), they are the 6-7th bigger software firm on the planet.
30k employees in 50 countries.

Why they bought TIBCO:

• Trusted partner with their customer
• Mission critical PRODUCTS enabling client CRITICAL activity
• Tech leadership focused on quality and innovation
• Area for best practices adoption

Vista priorities:

• Technological leadership… They plan to invest in TIBCO
• Drive (read : push for) cloud enablement
• Laser focus on : cloud integration, big data, internet of things
• Continued enablement of fast data : provide an actionable opportunity for customer

What run-time will AMX BPM use in the future ?

AMX Service Grid for a foreseeable future

What should we expect about AMX 3.3 planned end of support?

No precise information gathered on the subject.

Any updates planned on policy director?If so, is it staying on the AMX Grid runtime ?

Policy Director 1.1 and 2.0 are coming in next quarter

1.1 Update is mainly about bug fixes and providing support for the BusinessWorks5 REST API plug-in (not Service Grid) .

Version 2.0 will be deployed on the TEA, and then gain the extra perk of being fully scriptable in Python.

Can Java / Java Spring applications be hosted on BW 6 as they were on AMX Service Grid ?

As I understood from BusinessWorks 6 experts, since it is now developed in an Eclipse platform, Java integration will be much better than in Designer.

Can’t wait to test it