ROME, February 19 /PRNewswire/ --

- TIBCO ActiveMatrix(TM) Platform-Independent Approach Delivers Up to 49 Percent Greater Productivity Compared to Oracle, IBM, and BEA

TIBCO Software Inc. (Nasdaq: TIBX) today announced that a study conducted by PushToTest, the open-source test automation company, identified TIBCO ActiveMatrix(TM) as the most productive platform for implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The study, entitled "The Composition Approach for Large-Scale SOA," analyzes the leading SOA vendors by implementing and changing a reference service-oriented application using each vendor's technologies. It reveals that compared to the application server-centric approaches to SOA offered by Oracle, IBM and BEA, TIBCO's platform-independent approach can accelerate time-to-market and reduce labor costs by up to 49 percent when building and deploying services and assembling composite applications.

"Everyone from CIO's to the IT developer community are looking for a better way to develop, orchestrate, deploy and manage services," said Frank Cohen, founder of PushToTest. "Our research details a new composition approach to building SOA services and provides a methodology to evaluate today's tools in terms of developer productivity and ease of deployment and management. The analysis shows that TIBCO is the leader in understanding service composition and virtualization and is building products to meet enterprise needs."

PushToTest evaluated SOA development and deployment tools and platforms from Oracle, IBM, BEA and TIBCO to look beyond marketing claims and understand the skill sets, domain expertise and specialization required to be successful in each platform. The extensive research project, commissioned by TIBCO, took more than seven months to complete and required nearly four man-years of effort. A variety of metrics were carefully recorded along the lifecycle of common integration activities, from system setup through to post-integration quality assurance activities. The primary metric, and a key to understanding cost of ownership for integration projects, is the time and effort required to complete each activity. The study showed that it takes nearly twice as long to build the use case application when using BEA.

The areas of greatest developer productivity gains were in service construction, orchestration, policy management, security configuration and change management.

PushToTest determined that TIBCO's product architecture incorporates two unique design concepts, Service Composition and Service Virtualization, and that these were key drivers for the productivity savings.

Key findings from the study include: -- Large-scale SOA initiatives with dozens to hundreds of services must address a complex network of services, written in a variety of languages, tools, and patterns, and residing in multiple hosted environments. Success requires a composition approach to service development, and an architecture that separates governance from service development. -- Service Virtualization is an emerging architecture intended to host heterogeneous services, including Java and .NET. Service virtualization separates application business logic from the underlying technical implementation, including transports, governance and deployment details. -- Oracle, IBM, BEA, TIBCO tools have major differences in developer productivity and deployment. TIBCO's platform independent architecture is better suited for large-scale SOA initiatives that must deal with the complexity of deploying and managing services across heterogeneous platforms. -- In side-by-side implementations of a reference application, TIBCO ActiveMatrix provided the greatest productivity savings which can significantly reduce TCO: -- TIBCO required 49 percent less development costs to implement the reference application, compared to BEA -- 35 percent less compared to Oracle -- 22 percent less compared to IBM

"Our goal all along has been to help companies reduce the cost and complexity of deploying and managing service-oriented applications," said Ram Menon, executive vice president, Worldwide Marketing, TIBCO. "The results of PushtoTest's rigorous evaluation of the leading SOA vendor platforms are a tremendous affirmation of our platform-neutral approach to achieving this goal."

To access the full report, including detailed analysis on each of the platforms evaluated, please visit http://soakit.pushtotest.com.

About TIBCO

TIBCO digitized Wall Street in the '80s with its event-driven "Information Bus" software, which helped make real-time business a strategic differentiator in the '90s. Today, TIBCO's infrastructure software gives customers the ability to constantly innovate by connecting applications and data in a service-oriented architecture, streamlining activities through business process management, and giving people the information and intelligence tools they need to make faster and smarter decisions, what we call The Power of Now(R). TIBCO serves more than 3,000 customers around the world with offices in 25 countries and an ecosystem of over 200 partners. Learn more at www.tibco.com.

TIBCO, The Power of Now, TIBCO ActiveMatrix, and TIBCO Software are trademarks or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.

Web site: http://www.tibco.com

Phillip Tree of TIBCO Software Inc., +1-650-846-8529, ptree@tibco.com; Bill Bourdon of Bateman Group for TIBCO, +1-415-602-1491, bbourdon@bateman-group.com