TIBCO is an established Enterprise Application Integration product. Enterprise Application Integration came out from middleware technologies and right now about to get overridden by Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). In a Service-oriented Architecture communication between various services are fundamental and most of the Enterprise Application Integration patterns will be covered by various components of SOA. Will TIBCO then be an SOA platform? Yes. TIBCO has repositioned itself as an SOA platform already.

There is another paradigm shift that’s happening as service-oriented architectures get implemented in enterprises. Traditionally applications held the data and enterprise application integration tools helped these applications to communicate with each other and to create an integrated business process. With SOA it is possible to build applications around data. Customer data can be in the center with services, with capabilities to query, add, modify and delete the customer entity, exposed and these services can be part of different business processes such as order entry, billing, promotions, campaign management and all. The “integration” aspects of EAI will grow in importance than “application” aspects.

‘In today’s architectures essentially there are a few fundamental patterns for data processing which are Storage, Computation, Workflow and Presentation. TIBCO suite of products typically addresses the workflow and presentation aspects of data. The presentation aspects are something TIBCO added recently, and the traditional stronghold is workflow. In the past workflow required moving data between various applications. TIBCO occupied a leadership position among middleware technologies moving data between different applications.

In today’s world computation is moving closer to storage and workflow towards presentation. From this point of view TIBCO is positioning strongly on the workflow and presentation aspects while major database vendors strengthening their storage and computation offerings. Data integration and data visualization are two key functionalities in workflow and presentation, respectively. TIBCO’s product suite neatly gets classified into these two patterns, though not really represented that way on their website. This is also in line with applications around data paradigm. TIBCO aims to enable the business processes around data and present it well to the end users. I will not be surprised if The Information Bus Company becomes one of the majors in data integration and data visualization sometime in future.