With this new version, TIBCO offers additional support for emerging Web Services standards, greater flexibility to quickly create services with one-click user interface features, and integrated partner management support to help ensure service reuse across multiple trading partners.

Under the TIBCO BusinessWorks umbrella, TIBCO also announced today an upgrade to its BusinessConnect software offering – now re-named TIBCO BusinessWorks Partner Connect – to support business-to-business (B2B) partner integration within an SOA framework. By tightly coupling B2B with SOA, customers can build a more agile, responsive and cost-effective value chain through the sharing of information and business logic, as well as provide real-time visibility into information and processes. Consequently, strategic composite applications can leverage not only internal systems, but partner systems as well. These new features enable the rapid rollout of services and more streamlined automation of routine processes, helping companies to build stronger and more collaborative relationships with customers and suppliers.

"TIBCO's SOA strategy offers everything needed to create, expose and govern reusable services across the enterprise, both inside and outside the firewall," said Ram Menon, senior vice president, Marketing and Strategy, TIBCO. "SOA technologies and standards focus on the world within the organization, while the trading partner ecosystem outside an organization is often ignored. TIBCO's integrated partner management solution enables the secure exchange of documents and automation of transactions across public and private networks for exceptional trading community management. With these new releases, TIBCO solidifies its position of offering the most comprehensive and flexible foundation for an enterprise SOA available on the market today."

New and Enhanced Support for SOA & Reuse

TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.3 includes the following new features for SOA integration:

• New Wizards for Easier Web services Creation - One-click turns TIBCO BusinessWorks processes into Web services without having to define WSDL or other parameters WSDLs can be generated without coding using templates
• Services Represented More Intuitively in Context of SOA - Users can choose user interface perspectives
• UDDI Export Capabilities at Design and Deployment Time – The ability to publish WS details to UDDI registry, while abstracting complexity of non-relevant detail
• Services Reuse – Now easier to extend or reuse composite services and processes across enterprise

TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.3 and TIBCO BusinessWorks Partner Connect now support today's latest Web Services standards, including:

• WS-Security (XML Digital Signature and XML Encryption) - Allows users to encrypt particular elements of a message without the need to encrypt the entire message. Also features payload encryption, which enables encrypted messages to bridge disparate transport protocols and guarantees encryption and authentication between end points. In addition, the policy-based security functionality means rules can be added or changed without having to modify existing services.
• WS-I (Basic Profile) Certification - Ensures interoperability across different vendors' Web Services stacks and guarantees interoperability between partners in B2B scenarios.
• SOAP 1.2 – Supported over both HTTP and JMS transports

Separately, TIBCO today announced that Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. (SST), a leader in flash memory technology, has selected TIBCO Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) software for their new online business-to-business (B2B) partner trading community.

SST will deploy TIBCO BusinessWorks and TIBCO BusinessConnect – now renamed TIBCO BusinessWorks Partner Connect – for the delivery of services that will integrate existing applications, enable the secure exchange of critical information and streamline business processes involving multiple organizations. All this will help to facilitate the flow of real-time data between SST and their large ecosystem of third-party suppliers to manage inventory and reduce fulfillment times.

"SST ships 2 Million units of products a day and to achieve that we work with different vendors to manufacture our flash memory chips, so efficient supply chain management is crucial to deliver our products to market on-time," said Chi Yin, Vice President, Information Technology & Global Communications, SST. "After careful consideration of competing vendor solutions, we selected TIBCO based on their depth and breadth of SOA and B2B expertise, and the ease-of-use and flexibility of their products. We're confident TIBCO will optimize our supply chain and provide unparalleled visibility into our business, helping us achieve operational efficiencies and cost savings."

TIBCO's solutions for B2B integration are based on the RosettaNet and EDI standards, which enable SST and its partners to interact more efficiently and cost-effectively over the Internet. TIBCO BusinessWorks' standards-based Enterprise Service Bus backbone will mediate interactions among disparate applications and databases, automate business processes, manage transactions and Web services, and handle exceptions and process events. With TIBCO BusinessConnect software, SST will conduct transactions with other businesses through the secure exchange of business documents and automated cross–company processes.

"The dynamics of inter-organizational trading relationships introduces a whole new level of risk and complexity into the enterprise," said Ram Menon, senior vice president, Worldwide Marketing, TIBCO. "Companies must worry about data and network security and still maintain end-to-end supply chain visibility to avoid the high operational costs that can result from inefficient processes. TIBCO allows SST to simplify and accelerate the sharing of information and proven business processes with every member of their constantly evolving partner ecosystem - securely and easily."

Also today, TIBCO announced the launch of TIBCO Business Studio, the first software offering in a series of role-based design technology targeting the business user. TIBCO Business Studio represents a unified Eclipse-based environment that integrates modeling, management and simulation to help facilitate collaboration between business and IT users and optimize processes, thereby decreasing time-to-market of enterprise projects.

Enabling business users to easily define business processes that involve both people and systems helps to facilitate the seamless linking of services within a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to the business process. TIBCO Business Studio saves time and minimizes rework by enabling users to define processes in business terms. The resulting processes are easier to understand because they don’t include or require technical information. This makes it possible for non-technical users to own their business processes and intelligently manage them through the process lifecycle, including pre-planning, modeling, simulation of execution and re-modeling.

"Modeling and managing processes is becoming more and more difficult and there is ongoing pressure to reduce the time from design to execution," said Ram Menon, SVP, Worldwide Marketing, TIBCO. "TIBCO Business Studio streamlines complex processes, simulates "what-if" scenarios and encourages process optimization, helping our customers realize a return on their solutions even faster."

As BPM, SOA and business optimization technologies evolve, so does the complexity of the processes that they manage. According to the Gartner report released in February 2006, business process analysis (BPA) and modeling is becoming a starting point for BPM projects and compliance activities. The assistance of a tool with visualization and other features — such as simulation and activity-based costing — is essential to optimize business processes and realize BPM cost and time savings.

TIBCO Business Studio addresses the challenges of incorporating assets, both inside and outside of the organization, modeling them into business processes and simulating how they would perform prior to deployment. The end result is an ability to move to execution in a more timely and accurate manner. With TIBCO Business Studio, non-technical business users can automate models into deployable applications that leverage analytical efforts and better comply with business process rules. TIBCO Business Studio provides a more efficient and cost effective way to manage business processes overall.

Standards-Based Modeling/Guided Modeling

TIBCO Business Studio is standards-based with support for BPMN and XPDL. When defining a model, Business Studio will recognize any problems with the model and walk the user through how to make the model compliant. TIBCO Business Studio provides guided modeling, helping ensure that process models adhere to corporate methodologies. Those methodologies might be external, such as Six Sigma, or an organization's own custom methodology.