With DataSynapse, TIBCO looks to both present and future

TIBCO's acquisition of DataSynapse for a reported $28 million gives the company a development team and mature products with which to expand its financial-services revenue and flesh out its TIBCO Silver cloud computing platform. The acquisition means two things to application development organizations:

1. TIBCO will use DataSynapse's technology to support a variety of existing enterprise applications on its Silver cloud middleware. Silver, which is in beta test, today transposes new applications built in Java, C++, and several other languages to internal and public cloud infrastructure providers. DataSynapse's FabricServer software will help customers adapt a variety of existing applications to cloud infrastructure as well. These include Java applications based on IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, and Red Hat JBoss, Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, IIS, and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, Informatica, and SAS Institute, and a variety of vertical-industry specialists. This is a substantial expansion of TIBCO Silver's value to customers. 
2. TIBCO will now provide a product for running massively parallel workloads on grids of low-cost Intel servers. Data Synapse's GridServer is used for this purpose by the company's 83 listed customers, most of which are financial-services firms. TIBCO does not currently sell grid solutions, and so this will be add-on business, which is largely not integrated with TIBCO's integration, BPM, BI, and portal products. Financial services, life sciences, telecommunications, and public-sector organizations use such grids to run big models and simulations.

The big promise of TIBCO's acquisition of Data Synapse is obviously in the expansion of Silver its technology will enable. Forrester expects to see a tangle of Silver features from this acquisition during the second half of 2010 at the earliest, as TIBCO plans to ship the first release of Silver by the end of the second calendar quarter of 2010.

Forrester clients who have FabricServer installed today should feel good about this acquisition as it expands TIBCO’s reach for Silver and is thus strategic to its future direction. With stronger financial backing and the expanded sales force, TIBCO should be able to help push DataSynapse products well beyond its financial services beachhead.

The obvious question is around GridServer and if TIBCO will make the investment necessary to maintain as well as expand its presence in the grid computing market — or simply poach the technology purely for fleshing out Silver. We recommend GridServer customers take a cautious wait and see approach.

Customers considering TIBCO Silver should take a look at Fabric Server — making sure to understand its means of rehosting applications and how it provides shared services and scalability benefits as a sign of things to come from Silver.

Forrester's John Rymer contributed to this post.