Look for us up and running again after the new year! Thank you for being such loyal readers. Happy Holidays to all and best wishes for a happy and healthy 2013. 
The TIBCO Blog is taking a break for the holidays!
December 21, 2012 by
Federated Cloud – What does it mean?
December 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment
This is a confusing term. And, to complicate it further, it’s changing quite a lot.
Originally you have Public, Private and Hybrid clouds. Hybrid clouds were those that spanned private and public environments. Essentially, the scale out scenario or cloud burst scenario was often used to describe peak load expansion to a public cloud environment (think holiday sales promotion requiring more horsepower).
Federated cloud usually describes joining up and managing multiple public cloud environments – but there is nothing to prohibit joining multiple public clouds to a private one (so some overlap with Hybrid).
The central idea is that you have multiple IaaS and PaaS environments in the cloud. An application or a set of services may require the joining up and managing multiple PaaS and IaaS environments.
Now there are two classic scenarios: [Read more...]
The Nexus of Healthcare Forces
December 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment
We’re undergoing a revolution in healthcare that started with the American Recovery Act in 2009. Good things can come from bad things, and near economic collapse gave us a reason to invest. The Act funded the switchover from paper to digital record-keeping and amazingly, there was quite a bit of resistance at first. Someday we’ll look back at the arguments against digitization and chuckle. But now that we’re under way, other exciting things are more than possible, they’re happening.
Nexus of healthcare forces
Just as Gartner talks about the Nexus of Forces - cloud, social, mobile and information – healthcare is experiencing its own “nexus” that includes a surge in mobile devices, the aforementioned rapid digitization, big data coming from people, their devices and sensors, real-time analytics and business events. Each is remarkable by itself, but together they are changing healthcare.
Healthcare on the move
Mobile devices are already providing healthcare solutions through things as simple as apps on iPhones that can provide ECG readings in the moment and over time (a historical record). This trend will continue as more apps, devices, and sensors are implemented, with the downside being lots more strain on existing infrastructure. Doctors are using tablets, patients are using apps, and everyone expects access to be readily available. They expect IT to resolve the security issues as quickly as they come up. Governance, security and easy provisioning are an expectation for someone else to resolve.
IT needs help figuring mobility out. Serious help. [Read more...]
Conflicting Data or the Data Divide?
December 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment
This week there have been two reports released. One from Ofcom (independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries), which has reported that the UK’s mobile users are consuming more data on their phones and tablets than any other leading nation for the first time. A second from the Office for National Statistics has reported that 7.63 million adults in the UK have never used the internet, which is 15% of the population. They have coined a moniker for these people – “The Internots.”
So are the reports wrong? Or is there something else happening?
Let’s explore the reports in a little more detail.
Ofcom’s report, which you can download here, shows that the UK has one of the highest levels of penetration of smartphones in the world at 58%of the population, while just fewer than one in five owns a tablet computer. As a result, British consumers are downloading the most data on mobiles and tablets. In December 2011, the average UK mobile connection used 424 megabytes of data, higher than any other leading country, pushing Japan into second place at 392 megabytes and the US into sixth at 319 megabytes.
One-sixth of all website traffic in the UK was on a mobile, tablet or other connected device, higher than any other country in Europe. James Thickett, Ofcom’s director of research, said: “Our research shows that UK consumers continue to benefit from one of the most advanced markets for communications products and services.” [Read more...]
ACEA Has Light Bulb Moment With TIBCO
December 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The light bulb just went off in your head and you thought of an idea. Many people trying to think of an idea can relate to the “light bulb moment.” Ideas are born every day which become timeless throughout history. Everyone knows the story of Benjamin Franklin’s idea to tie a key to the tail of a kite on a stormy night with a lightning-filled sky. That idea allowed for more research on electricity. A light bulb went off for Franklin that allowed him to prove lightning was an electrical current existing in nature. He was not the first to research electricity, but his innovative thinking inspired great improvements and inventions. Like Franklin, ACEA has had some help with a great innovative charge in the energy industry.
ACEA developed from a basic electricity company into Italy’s largest municipal utility. The company is the leading supplier of water and among the largest distributors of electrical power. Equally significant, ACEA has also evolved from a state-controlled institution into a deregulated, free-market enterprise; one whose success hangs on its ability to render services at once efficient and robust. ACEA provides more than 2.7 million residential customers with power in the Rome area, and supplies water to more than seven million people. [Read more...]
Simplifying Operations – The “How” Matters
December 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment
I just got off with the phone with a customer discussing how TIBCO Silver® Fabric could impact their environment. The discussion started like most, where there was interest in cloud enabling their operations. They stated the reason they were looking at cloud computing was because they are under continued pressures to examine new avenues of simplification and streamlining tasks. They shared some details about the alternatives they are looking at. While I was explaining the TIBCO approach, I discovered a simple truth about vendor solutions. All too often, DNA of the vendor dictates how solutions are designed. At TIBCO, we have many years delivering sophisticated middleware and complex architectures in heterogeneous environments. In other words, TIBCO is highly accustomed to adding value while not being able to control the rest of the ecosystem.
When it comes to delivering value through streamlining operations, the question is: “Whose perspective are you streamlining?” Infrastructure operators? Middleware operators? Developer operators? The TIBCO solution, Silver Fabric, looks at streamlining from the perspective of middleware operations. As a middleware operator, there are a number of things to consider: What is the runtime architecture of the platform I am supporting? How does it scale? How does it restart? How do I deploy application code to the platform? How do I determine if the platform is healthy? The combination of these details creates a number of challenges toward streamlining operations across a heterogeneous middleware environment. This is a key differentiator for Silver Fabric, where we effectively allow operations manage vastly different middleware architectures in a consistent streamlined framework. By doing this, we’ve created the ability for middleware operations to create greater value for the organization such as: delivering a developer self-service portal, create multi-purpose environments and create a foundation to become a Cloud Service Broker.
Like the Wright Brothers, TIBCO Helps Scandinavian Airlines Innovate in Air Travel
December 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Orville and Wilbur Wright are credited with developing and building the first successful airplane. While they were not the first to build and fly an experimental aircraft, in 1903 they were the first to innovate the revolutionary concept of fixed-wing flight. Based on this fundamental shift in essential airplane architecture, we now have airplanes that travel the globe faster and better than anyone could have ever imagined. Every airline has them to thank for their business success, and Scandinavian Airlines understands the importance of safe and comfortable travel. Scandinavian Airlines is the fourth-largest airline in Europe and transports over 23 million passengers to 92 destinations in 33 countries each year.
The airline industry might appreciate the Wright brothers for their innovations in flying, but many other processes are critical to commercial airlines including customers and passenger service. As in most industries, unseen internal processes often get taken for granted, yet are just as important. Scandinavian Airlines is known as a technology innovator within the industry. They began migrating to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure in 2002 and now have approximately 60 to 70 services in use internally and externally. Just as every airline and pilot can be grateful for the Wright brothers, Scandinavian Airlines also appreciates the unseen help and support TIBCO provides to the company. TIBCO’s platform-neutral approach to SOA is helping the airline manage services across heterogeneous platforms – a critical success factor in their environment. [Read more...]
How Co-workers Used Private Social Networking to Provide Aid for Sandy Relief Efforts
December 3, 2012 by 1 Comment
New York- based TIBCO co-worker Mark Elder shares his story:
In a matter of days, we saw buildings under water, houses contaminated by overflowing sewers, ground floors that needed to be sterilized, heaters that needed to be replaced, people without power and temperatures that were dropping. It wasn’t just on the news. We were hearing stories from our friends, family, and co-workers. Martin, Tom, Dara and others had no power for 10 days, no internet, and no heat. Fortunately, none of them had been injured.
For me, New York had been my home for many years, and TIBCO, the company I worked for, had a long history in New York, starting on Wall Street. It seemed appropriate that we needed to do something to help with the hurricane Sandy relief effort.
I created a subject called “Operation Sandy” on our company’s private social network, and posted a message asking for donations to aid the Sandy relief effort. Employees started following the subject and asking how they could contribute. Once the campaign took off, donations started to stream in and within about five days, we had raised approximately $8,000, on top of the $5,000 TIBCO had already authorized for me to spend on supplies. [Read more...]
