Tibco's Silver cloud platform is designed to help architects and developers support the deployment of applications for enterprise environments. A beta product, it must mature before mainstream organizations are likely to adopt it. It does offer several unique features that show potential.

• Silver will be among the first unified application-platform-as-service (APaaS) and integration-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings hosted on Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).
• Silver relies on the shared-hardware model to provide multitenancy. A capacity planning guide is being developed and Tibco predicts that it will be available in August 2009.
• The basis for Silver is mature technology from Tibco's BusinessWorks and ActiveMatrix. Silver doesn't include a database management system, but Tibco offers tooling that can be used to implement multiple data management options.
• Tibco has not announced pricing models. However, the assumed lower ownership costs, compared with on-premises use of ActiveMatrix products and the hardware needed to deploy them, will enable organizations to build a business case for proceeding with investigative projects.

• Consider the Silver beta to be acceptable for risk-tolerant projects, but business-critical deployments are premature while Silver is in beta.
• Conduct prototype and proof-of-concept evaluations if you are a leading-edge organization or willing to take risks. From a technology standpoint, the risk of using Silver will be reasonably manageable.
• Remember to include required investments in sourcing the new architectural and technical skills required to effectively exploit Silver in cost benefit studies.

Tibco's Silver is one of the industry's first rapid application delivery platforms designed specifically for building and deploying cloud applications inside Global 2000 IT environments. Organizations can register for Tibco's Silver beta evaluation on Amazon EC2, which began on 20 July 2009 and runs through 31 December 2009.

With Silver, Tibco is playing to its established audience of system architects and developers. It is an interesting offering, but organizations must remember that this is an announcement of beta technology. However, the fact that Tibco has delivered something (even if it is in beta) is to the company's credit.

This research evaluates the current offering, which is likely to change as enterprises participate in beta evaluations during the second half of 2009. For example, Silver currently deploys on Amazon's EC2, but Tibco is likely to add other cloud platform suppliers.

Silver appears to offer richer service-oriented architecture (SOA) composition and integration features and functions than some APaaS players, such as Force.com and LongJump. However, organizations will view it as a trailing competitor in raw business software development projects because, until recently, Tibco had not offered an application server technology, and its expertise in this area is uncertain, despite its strong reputation in messaging and application integration. Silver is application infrastructure as a service because it provides features that support application integration (IaaS, business process management, and SOA governance in the cloud). Thus, Silver extends beyond being an application platform — it's the first application platform suite in the cloud.

Although it's not a duplication of ActiveMatrix products, Silver does leverage the messaging, integration and SOA foundation technology of ActiveMatrix products. Tibco is able to take this approach because its technology is Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi)-compliant. Thus, Tibco can create Silver functionality from the services comprising its commercial products, without creating an entirely new code base. This enables, for example, many of the services in the Silver container technology to be the same as those in Tibco's SOA products.

Silver leverages open-source technologies from Apache and Eclipse, but does not use any closed-source independent software vendor (ISV) products. Silver also incorporates service component architecture (SCA) technology that is available in commercial products from a small number of major vendors, including IBM, Oracle and SAP. However, bringing SCA to cloud-based applications is unique to Tibco.

Tibco's goal is to provide a platform that addresses key challenges in the delivery of applications in the cloud (not to reimplement the ActiveMatrix suite of products in the cloud). To accomplish this, Silver provides the capability to add and remove capacity to applications deployed using Silver in a manner that responds to changes in the load for those applications.

Silver cloud features include:

• Enterprise messaging — A reliable, available and secure messaging platform for cloud applications. It addresses inherent challenges in the cloud infrastructures to enable enterprise adoption.
• Integration features — Functionality, based on BusinessWorks, to mediate application-level interactions. It includes data transformation and orchestration, which it implements via a Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine.
• SOA foundation (AMSF) — Based on ActiveMatrix technology, this runtime foundation enables users to assemble, deploy, host, virtualize, manage and monitor services as composite applications. The foundation contains a Web Container and transport containers for HTTP, SOAP and Java Message Service (JMS). Silver will initially provide execution containers for Java and Spring, with other containers to follow. As subsequent containers such as C/C++, Ruby and Python roll out, Silver will enable users to build composite applications using a diverse set of programming models.
• Enterprise service bus (ESB) — Mediation technology, based on the ActiveMatrix Service Bus, that supports multiple protocols and implementation styles such as Web services and representational state transfer (REST). This ESB enables interactions between different Silver applications and between applications hosted on different instances. The ESB also enables interactions between Silver-based applications and Web services or Web-oriented architecture (WOA) services hosted on enterprise platforms.
• Service governance — Technology for ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts in composite SOA applications are operating as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality. Founded on a service registry, which uses Tibco Runtime Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) service, this leverages policy management features in ActiveMatrix containers.
• Management — Based on Hawk, this technology monitors application parameters, behaviors and loading activities for all Silver nodes, and takes action when predefined conditions occur.
• Dynamic configuration — Silver does not require system managers to manually add or remove required resources; rather, Silver accomplishes this automatically, by using functionality based on Tibco's Business Events.
• OSGi compliance — One of the benefits of OSGi compliance is that such infrastructure has "hot pluggable" architecture. To users, this means that Tibco is able to affect changes to Silver without having to bring down executing instances.

Analysis: The cloud-based features provide a comprehensive set of application infrastructure that supports the deployment of distributed, service-oriented business applications. In-line translation and service governance address IaaS requirements. Once the containers become available, the SOA foundation, combined with Silver's SCA runtime technologies, will significantly reduce the complexity of deploying a cloud-based, composite application that contains assets developed using multiple programming models, including Java, Spring, C/C++, Ruby and Python.

Tibco has designed AMSF to accept Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application servers (containers) and .NET CLR containers as plug-ins, like AMSG. Although this is a good start, it does not constitute a universal solution for the cloud. To provide a universal cloud solution, Tibco also needs to enable it to plug into proprietary containers, such as the Google App Engine, the Force.com container and other proprietary cloud platforms.

Silver's multitenancy is "shared hardware," which would not work as well for ISVs as shared everything. Customization per tenant is not supported, and the elasticity is more coarse than a shared-everything model. On the other hand, customization allows support for the deployment of Java and Java EE applications that will work well for hosting enterprise IT applications that expand and contract across hardware resources to meet performance requirements.

Silver offers Eclipse-based design-time tooling based on Business Studio. The tooling supports standards such as SCA, BPEL, Java and Spring.

Analysis: Support for BPEL, Java and Spring will make Silver attractive to organizations that have these skills in place. It will also make Silver more attractive than platforms that require proprietary development languages (for example, Apex from Force.com) because the use of a proprietary language results in platform lock-in. In particular, SCA abstracts implementation and deployment details such as interfaces, port types and bindings, which can simplify the deployment and management of services and composite applications. Tibco intends design-time tooling to work in conjunction with a user's integration development environment, not to replace it.

Silver lacks the portal and rich-client technologies required to support a modern user experience and mobile applications. However, subsequent beta revisions will also include Tibco's General Interface to facilitate Ajax front-end development. Tibco's goal is to provide Silver users with the ability to leverage popular user interface (UI) technologies, including Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Air and Java Server pages. Silver provides a generic Web container that supports these front-end technologies. The container also provides for SCA extenders so that UI components can consume SCA-based services rapidly.

Silver also lacks a database management system; however, the user has multiple choices to provide that feature, including:

• Using a database instance in their local data centers and applying a Web service interface at the front end.
• Setting up a relational database management system instance in the cloud. MySQL, Oracle and other vendors provide for Amazon machine image database implementations. Silver can work with these instances, but doing so will add to the cost of Silver and EC2.
• Integrating a cloud instance of a database with an on-premises instance, synchronizing the database changes in both directions.

To assist in implementing these choices, Business Studio's Silver edition provides for data connectivity and access management functionality, as well as data modeling and schema generation tools:

• Database connectivity and access management is established by a configuration that creates and manages the connection pools. The configuration is shared across application services or components that access the database.
• Data access and configuration is implemented by establishing shared resources providing a level of indirection so that it is easy to move applications from one environment to another without having to make changes to the services/components that refer the shared resources.
• The Silver platform also provides data services for executing creates, retrieves, updates and deletes on data housed in any relational database. These prebuilt services enable users to extract, utilize and update databases without having to write database code.

Analysis: While Silver provides a rich set of tooling for interacting with a database, a database management system is not a part of Silver. This requires users to select from among the options previously identified. Users electing to pursue the first option are likely to experience performance challenges because of the overhead entailed in Web services and in communicating through a firewall. Those electing to pursue the second option will incur the additional cost of an Amazon machine image database, but performance is likely to meet expectations. Users electing to pursue the third option will incur the previously described additive cost, as well as the cost of implementing, monitoring and maintaining the interface.

In the initial rollout, Tibco will provision customers (tenants) on their own instances of Silver. However, customers must provision their own EC2 resources. Thus, customers will be required to sign two contracts — one with Tibco for Silver and one with Amazon for EC2. The use of EC2 enables ActiveMatrix containers to add or subtract EC2 resources dynamically. Currently, there is no capacity planning model for EC2 resources. Tibco is working with Amazon and Silver beta customers to develop capacity planning documentation based on initial Silver usage. An initial draft is expected by the end of August 2009.

Another related issue that results from working with two providers (in this case, Tibco and Amazon) is support. Tibco cannot take complete responsibility for support, as it cannot address EC2 issues. Tibco will provide level-one support and must pass on to Amazon any problems it identifies as being hardware-related.

Analysis: Capacity planning is critical for determining the amount of EC2 resources in your Amazon contract. You can end up spending much more than anticipated (or required) if you provision too much of each of the EC2 resources.

For now, having two support organizations is not a show stopper. Support organizations are usually organized to pass unresolved problem reports to higher tiers, thus they are used to dealing with multiple support entities. However, Tibco must rectify the situation. Without hosting, the problems associated with consumers dealing with multiple providers will only get worse. After a certain point, customers will want some consolidation of services like billing, problem resolution and customization. They will expect Tibco to provide a unified view of these services. Without this, Silver will remain only a technology replacement that supports the broader issues of cloud computing but does not solve them.

Because Silver is a beta offering, Tibco has yet to set pricing. The company is looking at various pricing models, ranging from fixed-price leasing to subscriptions to "pay as you go." Current plans are for a Silver customer to execute two contracts — one with Tibco, one with Amazon — but this could change.

Analysis: The pricing of Silver will play a very important part in its success, and the arrangement Tibco has with Amazon Web Services (AWS) is also important. Silver customers must first go to Amazon and get an EC2 ID; therefore, it is likely that Amazon will track and bill each customer separately for use of EC2 (and Simple Storage Service, if the data for the applications hosted on Silver is to be persisted in the cloud). Tibco needs to alter this arrangement so that it is the only customer AWS "sees," and Amazon bills Tibco for the entire use, while Silver tracks and charges the customer. Until Tibco resolves this arrangement, the customer pays twice — once to Tibco and once to Amazon. This will seem unattractive and clumsy to prospects and is likely to inhibit adoption, to a degree. By itself, however, it will not be a show stopper, unless the total cost is too high.

One of the attractions of cloud-based computing is that sharing software and hardware will minimize the total tenant costs. With Silver, there is no sharing of software, as each tenant has its own Silver instance. Additionally, each tenant must provision its own EC2 resources with Amazon. The lack of sharing at both levels will result in higher costs than if multiple tenants share software and hardware costs. This will make Silver less-attractive to application ISVs relying on sharing of hardware and software to minimize platform costs and maximize profits.

Many organizations will watch from the sidelines, waiting for early adopter organizations to come up with Silver proof points. They will closely monitor the total cost of ownership to verify that using cloud-based technology will cost less than purchasing and deploying equivalent application infrastructure internally. They will also monitor how easy it is to deploy a cloud-based application using Silver. However, this is the same challenge that any new technology faces.

Silver will compete against user-driven development in environments, such as Google's App Engine and its yet-to-be categorized development and infrastructure pieces. It will also compete against application-driven platforms such as Force.com and Microsoft's Dynamics CRM.

Finally, Tibco faces the challenge of having little experience of selling services. It must learn to do this while evolving its business model and also becoming a master of software asset management to effectively manage the increased number of components caused by Silver.

Beyond the current announcement, Silver must exist in a broader strategy for cloud infrastructure offerings. The strategy that Silver currently implements can be characterized as "middleware goes to the cloud." Tibco must understand that Silver and similar offerings can play a pivotal role in providing a degree of cross-service interoperability between services based in multiple locations (on-premises and on different cloud platforms). Inevitably, Silver must provide intermediation for services, regardless of where those services are based — much like SOA infrastructure does for on-premises-based services. Cross-service intermediation would best be delivered as a service, not as a product.

Silver is currently a beta product, but it is among the first cloud platform offerings from a pure-play enterprise integration vendor offering products that target back-end, composite application integration and SOA projects. Tibco will likely package Silver as infrastructure for implementing private clouds.

However, there are challengers. Salesforce.com has offered Force.com, its APaaS, for two years with good success. IBM recently announced Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM cloud. Microsoft is experimenting with APaaS. However, several application infrastructure vendors are still considering how they will support cloud computing, or are ignoring this market entirely. Such market uncertainty underscores the fact that APaaS is an unproven business model.

It is to Tibco's credit that it is taking this approach, but it must proceed carefully in developing its business model. On one hand, it wants to promote Silver, but on the other hand, it doesn't want to erode the sales of its licensed products. Tibco must also streamline its software asset management skills to avoid overextending itself with the new line of software it has created. If it is unable to do this, then costs could get out of control, causing significant challenges in a period during which every resource must be as productive as possible.

Additional contributions by Teresa Jones, Benoit Lheureux, Paolo Malinverno and Roy Schulte