Tibco has launched a new platform for the rapid delivery of cloud applications by enterprise IT departments.
The Tibco Silver platform, announced on Wednesday, promises to reduce the time taken to build new cloud applications from days to minutes. It incorporates a feature called "self-aware elasticity", whereby cloud applications can automatically adjust up or down at the platform level, as demand for capacity changes, the company said. This feature can also adjust performance to ensure applications meet service-level agreements.
Deploying cloud applications can be costly if demand suddenly falls or spikes, because enterprises will often need to remove the application from the cloud entirely to change the build specification.
This sort of functionality can reduce the costs involved in cloud technology, according to Clive Longbottom, a service director with industry analyst Quocirca. "If you're running a big enterprise application in a cloud, you'll have an operating system, application server, application and all the other things running alongside. Taking that out of the cloud to increase memory and then putting it back in impacts business availability and costs money," he added.
Tibco is not the first vendor to offer this kind of technology; 3tera and Platform Computing offer similar automatic flexing for cloud applications. Longbottom also expects Microsoft to follow suit when it launches its Oslo modelling platform later this year. In addition, VMware and IBM already have much of the capability they will need to match Tibco within a few months, he said.
"I would expect that within two years, all the major systems-integration vendors will be offering this functionality. If you don't do this by 2011, you simply won't be on the enterprise shopping list," Longbottom said.
The new platform supports a variety of languages, including Java, C++ and Ruby, and provides support for .Net and Spring. This means architects can construct composite applications using services developed in a number of programming languages.
Tibco Silver will be launched in beta on 30 June, with general availability expected from January 2010. Pricing has not yet been confirmed.
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