TIBCO Silver was covered in Gartner’s report “Tibco’s Silver Cloud-Computing Platform Shows Potential” by Jess Thompson, David Mitchell Smith, Yefim V. Natis, Massimo Pezzini, and Daryl C. Plummer, August 6, 2009.

Mike Culver, Web Services Evangelist at Amazon Web Services(AWS), shares his thoughts on TIBCO Silver

It’s been about two months since we announced TIBCO Silver, and the overall response has been overwhelmingly positive. We are very pleased with the positive reaction and excitement that Silver has generated among our customers, partners, press and the analyst community. There have been quite a few articles by the press and blogs by various independent thinkers on Silver. Here is a quick synopsis of some of the analyst articles and blog posts.

On the analyst front - Gartner published its research note on TIBCO Silver (Aug 6, 2009) titled “TIBCO’s Silver Cloud-Computing Platform Shows Potential.” Authored by some of the leading Gartner analysts, the report gives us positive feedback overall on our positioning and calls out our cloud platform strategy as “genuine”(not just another AMI) and describes the offering as unique and ahead of the curve compared to the other cloud platforms. MWD published its first take on Silver titled “TIBCO gets on to the Cloud with Silver,” noting that TIBCO is the first vendor offering an enterprise class cloud platform. Several other analyst firms, including Forrester, have given us their thumbs up on Silver.

On the independent blog front - “ The next generation of cloud-development platforms” is a very interesting blog post by James Urquhart. His depiction of Silver’s three-element architecture is right on the mark, although I would like to point out that the only component that runs in our datacenter is the initial provisioning server. Once the account is provisioned, Silver and all its components run entirely on the customer’s virtual machine instances. Other interesting blog posts are “TIBCO Silver: RAD and governance for enterprise clouds” by Dennis Howlett , “TIBCO Silver – Amazon for dummies” by Maureen O’Gara, “TIBCO takes PaaS plus integration capabilities to global enterprises via their choice of clouds” by Dana Gardner. These blogs explain Silver quite well and are all good reads.

We also published a couple of articles highlighting the challenges that enterprise customer have in adopting cloud computing - Enterprise Ready Rapid Delivery Platform for the Cloud and Cloud Governance.

The Silver Beta Program is in full swing. Since the beta program was kick-started on July 20^th, more than 200 customers have registered. In my next blog post I will detail the interesting set of cloud use-case patterns that have come to the fore. Btw, if you haven’t done so already, please sign up for the TIBCO Silver Beta program.

Like many my first personal computer was a Commodore 64. I immediately wanted to *do* something with it – to create something new with it.

I remember poring over these archaic references guides, learning 6502 assembler and the special code pages that would enable sprites and colors and all the rest. The level of dedication and effort required to do anything on that tiny machine was huge. Building anything with it was a personal experience.

But my biggest shock came when I interacted with a “real” computer. It was an alien beast. All of my hard won, deep knowledge on the “play” computer were irrelevant. Beyond understanding the basic principles of programming and machine architecture – nothing else was transferable. I had to learn everything about this new computer from scratch. Even things that had no business being different – were different. It was another set of (even) larger reference manuals with another set of archaic knowledge.

The barrier to entry for each new system was huge. Don’t know the secret handshake you’re kinda screwed. Don’t have enough time to focus and get to know the nuanced aspects of the system – doubly screwed. Each system had its own set of good and bad bits. What you always dreamed of was a ‘super computer’ that would somehow take all of the best bits from a bunch of different systems and forget the rest. A computer that would be tailored just for your needs, skills and requirements.

Fast forward and we have the same problem today with architectures, tools and languages. Knowledge sharing and the advent of the internet has definitely reduced the barrier to entry but it hasn’t fundamentally changed the problem. Each tool or language or framework has its own little idiosyncrasies and details. But often one tool isn’t going to get the job done. But the pain associated with trying to stitch together different technologies into a single application can be a painful exercise. Then deploying that solution in a repeatable way is the next challenge.

The final challenge is really the killer. Once you have assembled this Frankenstein application trying to pick the best of different tools and languages – how do you evolve your application? How can you easily change one part out for a new technology or architecture?

What we set out to do with TIBCO Silver™ was to enable the creation of not just enterprise class cloud applications but to enable a developer and architect to essentially choose a set of tools and technologies that they are comfortable with. Essentially we wanted to allow a user to personalize the new “super computer.” Do you like ActiveRecord from Ruby on Rails but are also pretty solid with Spring? Then fine – use those technologies in Silver. We will take care of the communication, security, scale and deployment aspects of this AR/Spring solution. You get to focus on building the solution, not building out yet another custom framework.

With TIBCO Silver™ we are often talking about Months to Minutes. For me it is making my tools personal again.