Following on from Tibco’s formalization of Silver as its Cloud platform, the company used this week’s Cloud Computing World Forum at London’s Olympia to formally introduce its first application built entirely on top of the Silver family.
This is Tibbr, the `social media’ application it has been working up to product status for a while now. Having started life as a social application called Ping, it has now grown into a policy-driven social platform aimed at large enterprises operating in the cloud.
According to Sriram Chakravarthy, Tibco’s head of Cloud Services and Product Strategy, the objective was to find an alternative to the popular social media tools like Twitter and Facebook. The need came not because they were intrinsically `bad’ – the fundamental model has a great deal going for it as a business tool - but because there is no way available to control the potential for information leakage. What was needed was a tool that could be kept behind the firewall and added capabilities needed in the enterprise environment.
The key development here was to extend the ways in which users can `follow’. In the public services the normal approach is to follow an individual. “We experimented with this and found that, in a business context, only a few tweets were actually relevant. The others were about personal activities like `going shopping’,” he said.
So to make it more relevant to business the ability to follow by subject was added, so that users can pull together all communications that relate to subjects the user selects. This has been extended so that settings can be defined for who can follow what subjects and who can contribute to subjects. So it is now possible to have a freeform social media environment that is managed by policies set by both individuals and management. In addition, it all remains within the enterprise, behind the firewall.
The company has one other application now available, aimed at the many occasions where business processes and internal Human Resources tasks lead to the generation of physical forms that have to be circulated, filled in and results collated. PeopleForms works with a set of templates that allows fast form creation, online access and provides tools to collate and analyse the results. Interested users can experiment with it on www.formvine.com.
The fact that Tibco has produced two applications on top of the Silver platform poses the question of whether the company plans to move into apps and service development more fully.
Chakravarthy formly denied the possibility, though he did indicate that there is a possibility it could move into providing an applications brokering and/or co-marketing for customer-generated applications and tools that have general market application. “It is not part of our current plan for Silver,” he added.
The other major development Tibco is undertaking is to extend the range of infrastructures on which Silver can run. “Our aim is to be the infrastructure-neutral platform of choice, a standard platform for cloud applications,” he said.
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