Entering the next phase of its SOA strategy, Tibco Software Inc. released new software and services this week to help users become service-enabled faster.
On Wednesday at Gartners Web Services and Integration Summit in Orlando, Fla., Tibco announced Version 5.0 of its Portal Builder product, and new Accelerated Value Framework that offers best practices around SOA (service-oriented architecture) implementations.
Portals are becoming the face of SOA, Tibco officials said.
“Tibco has had a history of developing implementations across the board for large enterprise customers,” said Aiaz Kazi, general manager of Business Integration at Tibco, based in Palo Alto, Calif. “Weve captured all that information into a set of best practices around SOA to manage SOA deployment and governance across the entire life cycle.”
The Accelerated Value Network is a set of best practices and methodologies thats delivered, interestingly, through a team of Tibco architects (though Global Services still does the implementation work).
At the same time, Tibco released its Portal Builder 5.0, providing additional features for showing users the value of implementing a services-based architecture.
Kazi gave the example of a portal developed by the airlines that allows users to make reservations for plane tickets, hotels and cars. The first steps for the airline would be to deploy the portal to get across these services. The next steps would be to combine those services with SOA, along with services on the back end, to allow a single transaction for the combined services.
Because the user interfaces in Portal Builder 5.0 are configuration-driven, users have a more simplified development environment that enables business users to work in the portal, according to Kazi.
At the same time, the upgraded portal is based on several SOA standards, including Java Specification Request 168—a Java API for portlet interoperability—and WSPR (Web Services for Remote Portlets) that enables integration with content as well as applications.
It also supports some new infrastructure components, including servlet engines and database servers, officials said.
Portal Builder 5 has also been built out to interact with Tibcos integration and process management software.