Reflection from TIBCO Now

I had the privilige of visiting TIBCO Now 2016 in Las Vegas. It is a good way to get information on where the Systems Integration field is moving and what new interesting techniques are being developed. There were a lot of helpful technology available, one thing that I liked was the downloadable app that enabled you to create your own agenda from the multitude of information sessions during the break outs. It also contained all the information needed to find your way around the conference and also provided means of searching for participants (great for networking!).

*Found my own star also when in the states!*

TIBCO has the new motto ‘Cloud first’, which really shows their commitment to the cloud. As an architect I was interested in getting to know the best practices regarding hybrid cloud integration. As I see it, cloud is really here to stay, regardless if it is a private cloud residing in your own data center or if you buy the service. A hybrid cloud is where you use both worlds, as an example it can be because you are not allowed to expose your sensitive data to an external data source but you still have business cases that benefits of a move to an external cloud.

TIBCO sees the cloud as the next evolutionary step from SOA. So what will TIBCO bring to the table in the cloud realm? As they see it, micro services and Web APIs are the way forward when it comes to integrate and create functionality for the business. How they plan to help with integration in the cloud is that they will use techniques such as In-Memory, Multi Core Rest and JSON. The infra structure is different in the cloud, you must understand that things that you use in an EA for integration such as file storage and file transfers is not supported by the cloud. You must shift your thinking to use messaging, in-memory storage and perhaps a database to safe keep important information. You will have to rely heavily on APIs and the payload will more often than not be JSON.

To support this cloud first initiative TIBCO has a couple of new products such as TIBCO Business Works 6 container edition, Tibco Mashery and TIBCO Cloud Integration and they encouraged us to try it out. I will do that and also write about my experiences with it. I will also cover the two keynote speakers on TIBCO Now in another blog, they were really interesting and worth their own little space here.