Tibco Software Inc. is looking to cash in on the movement of enterprise application integration software into the mainstream with the next release of its flagship product.
The EAI software developer will announce on Monday ActiveEnterprise 4.0 that is designed to help companies tap into emerging technologies like Web services, integrate the latest applications with mainframes and model business processes.
As IT people start to think about and deploy Web services, integration becomes a key issue, according to Tibco officials, in Palo Alto, Calif. To provide the greatest breadth of integration capabilities AE4 offers support for Java 2 Enterprise Edition, XML(extensible markup language), Web services and Java messaging. Additionally, all metadata is delivered in an XML schema.
The company gets its hooks into Web services with AE4, but officials said they would announce a significant new Web services tool within the next two months.
The AE4 platform offers easier deployment capabilities through two new tools. The Tibco Designer Environment provides a common view of integrated systems and the Business Process Management Designer provides a unified view of business process management so users can orchestrate business processes across one platform. This second tool facilitates drag and drop mapping of workflow, automated tasks and exception handling to allow users to map and model business processes while interacting with underlying systems.
The upgraded integration platform also offers support for integrating the mainframe – what company officials called “the last bastion of EAI.” The Tibco Substation ES component acts an assistant to the mainframe operating system by sitting under it and listening to and publishing events.
In addition, the Substation requires no new code with adapters that integrate with Customer Information Control Stations (the main transaction controls) and Information Management Systems. AE4 offers a common GUI infrastructure for rolling out adapters.
The ActiveEnterprise 4.0 platform will be available next week.