TIBCO – The ready-made road to the Edge for enterprise users

TIBCO is not offering a product or point solution for use in building compute and data management services out to the Edge. Rather, it’s vision is to offer an environment capable of providing both the integrated connectivity and the management of the whole environment, and targeted at its existing customer base – the large, established enterprises. That does not mean it would automatically turn down a serious approach from a new customer, but it is the view of both TIBCO itself and Cloud Software Group that their existing customers will generate significant amounts of new business.

Fig 1 – TIBCO Cloud – Integration

Large enterprise infrastructures are now facing development out to the Edge at the same time as facing the situation where their work environments change continually rather than a series of episodic revolutions. In addition, the depth and breadth of data facing business users, where that data is generated, acted upon and stored is now a fundamental issue.

For many large enterprises the issue is no longer about databases or the technology underpinning data, it is about the data itself, wherever it is physically located, as an addressable, exploitable entity. TIBCO’s metadata database, Tibco Cloud Metadata, is designed to help users pull together radically different forms of data that pertain to a specific subject or project.

Most of the tools required already exist to provide services out to the Edge, but there is one that has been specifically engineered for the sector. This is TIBCO Flogo Enterprise, TIBCO’s fully supported implementation of the open-source Project Flogo Framework. Designed to allow developers to build ultralight, event-driven microservices, it uses browser-based flow design technology to allow users to start running logic and preferred browsers on any device that has a suitable processor chip on-board. This means that business process logic and system control functions can be distributed down to the very end point devices of the network.

The coming TIBCO management platform is envisioned as the key system that allows all the elements of Edge computing to become an integral component of the largest and most complex enterprise environment. This does not mean, however, that the company is pitching to be the provider of all the tools, applications and services that such companies will require, and certainly not as a ‘single SKU that is the universal answer to everything’. It definitely aims to stick with what it is best known for – tight integration of the elements such businesses need to exploit, and extending the full facility of them across the widest extremes of the corporate network, however far that is distributed and convoluted it’s connection requirements may be. The goal is to ensure that users can leverage their resources to best advantage wherever they, or the resources, are.

The key TIBCO contribution is that the Edge, at scale, becomes an integral and native part of the whole corporate infrastructure. This brings two specific advantages: one allows Edge devices, particularly as they develop from passive sensors to become small, duplex systems that can be re-programmable – in the field or via the Web – to accommodate changes in the tasks they are required to perform. The second is that the data flow of a business process can be layered and widely distributed, reducing the overall time and costs of excessive data movement. Individual devices can process local raw data into something of value, which in turn can be processed in departmental/regional hubs or nodes, which then provide data of immediate value to the business up the chain to the main data centres. Reports can then be sent to executives in formats suitable for a wide range of end user clients – from laptops to smartphones to Raspberry Pi-based devices.

An important factor here is the increasing penetration of 5G mobile communications, which TIBCO sees as offering the potential to make the Edge increasingly smart, which in turn is likely to have the effect of increasing the value and importance of the Edge, moving the Centre of Gravity of the whole corporate network down towards the highly distributed end.

This trend is only likely to increase as AI is added to Edge capabilities. For example, AI is already finding real-world applications in areas where only limited real-time choices and options are possible and the speed of decision making is the primary value, an application type that can be widely expected to be found in edge computing operations.

The company sees the potential for applications such as these to be able to perform detailed, in-depth forensics, in real-time and at the point of occurrence, as would be possible with a major forensic application running on the main back-end data centre – and providing not only a result but also actions based on that result, far more quickly. In applications where the action concerns the location of a shipping container speed may not seem overly relevant, but when the application is the safe management of a loaded highspeed train, getting a result and applying it can prove vital.

Another important aspect, especially when it comes to the development of Edge systems and services as a new part of established enterprise environments, is the provision of effective governance services. TIBCOs long track record with large enterprises means that it already brings extensive skills and capabilities in providing and managing governance services at both scale and complexity. Some smaller businesses may find this capability important to them as they break into new markets.

Different sectors of business will obviously have different requirements when it comes to the specific tools that are required, and TIBCO has a simple policy for such areas, its goal is to seamlessly integrate with the tools and platforms the customer selects or already uses, on the basis of: ‘why develop it when you can connect to it’.