Did you hear about TIBCO Silver™ and wondered what this might be? Here is a quick answer:

Listen to Vivek Ranadivé, Chairman and CEO of TIBCO Software, as he provides an overview of TIBCO Silver™.

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.

Conversations around the cloud usually have a general dose of “elasticity” thrown in. Elasticity is the ability to scale up and down quickly and it’s touted by many as one of the key benefits of deploying applications to the cloud. Although I don’t deny the benefits of elasticity I do think this is a topic of significant importance that begs a closer look.

A good starting point is to ask the question - Can my applications automatically scale up and down without intervention via changes to the application code or deployment architecture? The key phrase here is “without intervention.” As a developer, I do not want to be coding how my application scales up and down. I expect my cloud platform to take care of this for me irrespective of the cloud infrastructure.

Let’s take an example of an online travel reservation application. As an application developer I want to be focused on developing the business logic. The cloud platform should automatically scale the application up or down based on infrastructure utilization like CPU, memory, network I/O utilization and scale the application up or down to meet application-level SLA expectations – like end-to-end response time of 30 seconds for a search query, response time of 15 seconds for a reservation request, and so on. Also, the overall elasticity should not be dependent on whether the application is running on EC2 or another infrastructure.

Enabling our customers to build out these “ElastiApps” is precisely what we wanted to achieve with TIBCO Silver™ — by providing a self-aware elastic fabric that automatically grows and shrinks the entire application or specific components that are a part of the application based on application or infrastructure usage. With Silver we can truly say “May the force be with you” to be as elastic as you want.

Hi and welcome to the TIBCO Silver™ blog.  As you peruse your RSS feeds today, Cloud Computing is a new mantra that has moved through the inevitable hype cycle that characterizes our technology landscape. A few of us at TIBCO were talking about the advantages of Cloud Computing well before this became a new label to slap on old bottles. In 2007, Matt Quinn, our SVP of Engineering, and I started an involved conversation of why enterprises really need to look at cloud computing.

In October 2007, Amazon released their S3 SLA, a 99.9% uptime on their monthly storage service. In quietly offering this SLA, it was a turning point in the realization that business SLA’s for computing as a service was quickly becoming a reality. However we realized that whenever we talked to our customers about cloud computing, enterprise architects would bring up three questions which usually stopped the conversation cold - (a) who is going to have access to my data, (b) can I use components from my old applications and (c) will my business SLA’s on the application hold?

TIBCO Silver™ is a result of many whiteboard sessions across TIBCO Product groups, conversation with customers and much debate  on the approach to remove these impediments to Enterprise Cloud Computing. Take a look at the stuff on the website and we welcome your comments.