Real-time response
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Tibco is seeking to combine SOA with EDA to deliver the real-time enterprise architecture.
Don Adams, chief technology officer (CTO) of Tibco spent 23-years in the United States Air Force. And, he says, if an aeroplane cockpit was like an IT system, he would not like to think of the consequences.
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In reponse, Tibco is seeking to combine the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and event-driven architecture (EDA) into a "real-time enterprise architecture" which, he says, "forms the baseline of the predictive enterprise".
"An SOA is loosely coupled but mostly synchronous," says Adams, but the way the world runs is asynchronous. The real-time enterprise architecture is, therefore, both synchronous and asynchronous allowing users to distribute programmes across the organisation in a truly flexible and modular fashion."
Taken down to its bare bones, the real-time enterprise architecture (RTEA) is able to visualise information in motion, information at rest and business processes, to "close the loop between data and understanding". The SOA's benefits of reuse and flexible composition are tied into the business with an EDA, which along with predictive analytics and modelling allows a system to sense and respond to a problem before it happens.
Adams says four large customers are already using Tibco's RTEA, which begins by making legacy systems available through the business, and making them relevant to the right people. "It's about getting a return on assets the business has already spent money on, rather than return
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The key drivers for investing in an RTEA, says Adams, are lower ownership costs, risk mitigation and business agility. "It's all about launching new services and products before your competitor," he says. While he acknowledges that these issues have always been business imperatives, he believes that the imminent arrival of millions of web services exacerbates the problem and will be manageable only with the correct architecture in place.
He also acknowledges, however, that the predictive enterprise is still some way from complete realisation - although the pieces should be in place by mid-2005 and, he says, Tibco is heavily involved in the associated standards efforts.
The final vision of the RTEA infrastructure and platform must be vendor and technology agnostic, architecturally flexible and standards compliant. Only then will the service-oriented business be cleared for take-off.
