Evolution of Integration Architecture: a perspective with reference to TIBCO

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1 Evolution of Integration Architecture: a perspective with reference to TIBCO by Abhinav Goyal abhinav_goyal@infosys.com goyal_abhinav@yahoo.com Executive Summary Software architecture is like the blue print of the enterprise applications and Enterprise Application Integration architecture can be classified as a subset of the overall blue print, focusing on the integration of Enterprises and providing value added services to the existing enterprise architecture. This EAI architecture blueprint defines how applications may be built and how the business logic may be distributed on multiple servers, incorporating standard protocols and interfaces for interacting with other programs/ applications, providing flexibility and scalability to application architecture. We all have seen enterprise applications maturing at a very rapid pace over last 20 years or so. Applications have moved-on from being monolithic mainframe stand alone servers to being the two-tier to threetier to n-tier applications. The super rapid pace of globalization in the last few years has been one of the biggest challenges for the industry IT architects to constantly improve, innovate and automate as many business processes as possible. Increased global competition and mergers and acquisitions have only fuelled this challenge. Though architects have since then moved away form designing single monolithic applications to distributed, decoupled and agile applications, Enterprise Application Integration technologies have been playing a vital role in integrating Enterprises. Even EAI technologies have since then undergone multiple waves of evolutionary changes and are now the backbone of most global organizations. TIBCO has been one of the pioneers in EAI space and has been helping enterprises world wide, to go global and integrate with their customers/ vendors/ subsidiaries/ logistic and other partners. TIBCO started primarily as a data integration tool with very limited value add being offered by it in the process. Since then it has evolved to become a platform to host applications built on SOA to build decoupled, flexible, scalable, agile and high performance applications. This article is a perspective to appreciate how TIBCO has evolved over a period of last few years and has helped setting up standards in the process. March 14, 2007 Page 1 of 5

2 Journey so far TIBCO products till early 4.x suite of products were more of data integration centric and TIBCO had evolved as a decent message transformer, by then. TIBCO primarily used and promoted its proprietary messaging information bus as the messaging backbone before extending support for the industry standards such as JMS. Though TIBCO tried to bring all of its products on a single UI for configuration, it was still nascent and work was in progress. Integration of applications was mainly adapter based and TIBCO focused on providing more and more adapters to be able to integrate with a wide variety of applications. Deployment of TIBCO products was mostly a manual process and required specific skills to deploy and administer the components. There were very limited fault tolerance capabilities available from TIBCO for its products. Though TIBCO did provide some user exits and custom function facilities to its users, it was still very limited as most of the code and messaging layer was proprietary. TIBCO was by far using the proprietary format of the repository (binary format) till early 4.x before deciding to start supporting repository in the industry standard XML format. Compared to the earlier versions with 4.x release of the products, TIBCO started extending support in a big way for some of the commonly used platforms like HP-UX and Linux in addition to Win and Solaris. Though TIBCO had emerged as a strong integration product by 4.x release of TIBCO products, it was yet to mature in terms of providing security, business process management and business intelligence capabilities. A limited business process integration capability was available using TIBCO Integration Manager and using early release of TIBCO Business Works. So far, TIBCO had not focused much on migration strategy for its customers to upgrade from the earlier versions of the product to 4.x versions. This was more so because thus far most of the products were being built on the proprietary stuff and had only lately started moving on the industry standards which posed a lot of challenge to move away from the proprietary stuff. With the release of 5.x suite of products, TIBCO declared the re-birth of itself and made its intention very clear that it no longer want to be classified as proprietary technology, any more! TIBCO started adopting and promoting industry standards like JMS over its proprietary RV Bus. TIBCO took a wise decision of bringing all components on a single platform for configuration using its TIBCO designer and providing a similar look and feel for most products configuration UI. Design time and run time configurations were merged together in the single UI and most of the configurations were made editable at the deployment and run time. This made it much easier for developers to build, test, deploy and maintain the products with the help of a centralized administrator which would host the repositories and help maintain the infrastructure. TIBCO released its Business Works product which provided very strong process March 14, 2007 Page 2 of 5

3 integration facilities with some workflow integration capabilities. Users could now do the distributed development of the business processes and adapters, as the repository format was converted into the multi file structure with support for most of the popular version control systems. It was also possible to deploy the TIBCO products in fault tolerance mode and check point the business processes to prevent the data loss in case of any failures. The road ahead With the shift in the basic architecture of TIBCO products since 5.x it is very important for customers using any 4.x or earlier versions of TIBCO products to move away from the legacy products and join the new open standard based product suite and leverage the newer capabilities of the new and existing products rather than being limited to just the data and technology integration. People and process integration is now the key in the new environments to be able to achieve BPM (Business Process Management), BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), CEP (Complex Event Processing), BTM (Business Transaction Management), EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) and BI (Business Intelligence) capabilities. With TIBCO CIM (Collaborative Information Manager) it is now possible to manage and maintain the master data and integrate it with the mainstream enterprise integration using JMS or MQ. With the advancement in the internet based technologies in the recent years, TIBCO is now offering its award winning AJAX based product TIBCO General Interface to build RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Recently TIBCO has announced the release of its much awaited release of Business Works with BPEL extension, which would take organization a step further towards standardization and help them to move on SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). TIBCO Staffware is another recent addition to TIBCO suite of products which provides full BPM capabilities to its customers. In the late 2006, TIBCO announced the release of its new visionary SOA product TIBCO ActiveMatrix. With TIBCO ActiveMatrix, TIBCO has joine the race to be a leader in the SOA space. TIBCO ActiveMatrix is a platform built on SOA that provides enterprises with the ability to host any of the existing services within the enterprise on this platform or create new services using any of the popular technologies. ActiveMatrix is a visionary project from TIBCO which would take away the service management and governance complexities within the enterprise by providing a single platform for managing its service oriented architecture. It would now be possible to write new services without worrying about the technology, transport layer/ protocol to be used or where the services would be physically hosted. Logging level feature, security features like authentication, authorization, and content based routing and other heaps of features can now be easily applied at run time with the help of out-of-the-box policies making it much easier for the developers March 14, 2007 Page 3 of 5

4 to focus on building core functionalities. Though messaging infrastructure is supported by TIBCO ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), policies would be supported by a policy bus, both being put together under the umbrella of NMR (Normalized Messaging Router), based on SCA (Service Component Architecture) which is the back bone of ActiveMatrix. The figure below shows a perspective to SOA reference Architecture. The service oriented architecture is a fundamental shift in the way we look at achieving business process management capabilities instead of application/ interface based integration. While service registry helps publishing and locating services which in-turn helps in re-use of services and avoid duplication, policy management allows you to govern and manage your services. March 14, 2007 Page 4 of 5

5 End note We are currently undergoing an architecture revolution as products are competing to take the lead in this space and it is very important for the enterprises to keep themselves updated with these major architectural changes, before it becomes impossible to move away from the legacy and end-up re-writing everything. While a lot has changed in the enterprise architecture in very recent past, a lot more evolution is expected in the near future which would be built on top of the latest SOA based products which makes it all the more important to move to the service oriented architecture, before it becomes too late to make use of migration paths available! It is expected that going forward most product vendors would be forced to move towards the open standards, if they have not already started doing so. There would be more platform based products with other supporting products becoming plug-ins to the platform. Proprietary technologies/ protocols would soon die and get replaced with the industry standards. Vendors would soon have to make products extend support for Grid like architecture which would enable organizations to share the available distributed infrastructure to near capacity by self healing, self management capabilities and auto scale up or down, on-demand. March 14, 2007 Page 5 of 5