Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Tibco and Hardware Acceleration

It is interesting to note Tibco's sudden renewed interest in Rendezvous (RV). A few months ago, I had lunch with an ex-Tibco consultant who now consults independently for various Wall Street companies. This fellow told me that Tibco was really paying attention to the shots fired across its bow by companies like RTI, 29West, and Tervela. Because of this, Tibco would try to breathe some new life into RV, after spending so much focus on EMS.

Coincidentally, two people independently told me to take a look at Solace Systems. Solace seems to do XML content-based parsing and routing. This was the same route taken by Xambala, a company who I have not heard much about lately.

Hardware-based routing of XML packets would seem to fit in well with Morgan Stanley's CPS message bus. It would also fit in well with CEP engines that like to deal with XML, such as Coral8. Imagine a hardware-based XML-to-Coral8-Tuple processor. Or something that would take XML-based newsfeeds and do some kind of parsing that could be used with semantic processing engines, like Semlab. Or, can there be any kind of synergies between hardware-based XML transformations and WPF/XAML?

I would be interested to hear anyone's ideas around messaging and hardware acceleration.

Here are some links to articles about the Solace/Tibco partnership:

http://www.automatedtrader.net/algo-trading-news-1297.xhtm

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/30/tibco-hardware_1.html

I hope that Tibco also starts thinking about hardware acceleration for EMS as well as RV.


Addendum

As per Brian Theodore's comment below, the hardware acceleration that Solace is providing to RV does not involve any XML parsing.


©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved.
All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Marc. Note that the TIBCO Message Appliance is based on the new Solace "topic card", which is *not* XML-based. Their other cards do XML in hardware (XPATH and XSLT). The TIBCO Messaging Appliance basically implemented the RV protocol (hence advertised as an RVD replacement) in hw on their topic card. Agreed though, it is interesting stuff, and likely a disturbing problem for other proprietary hardware-based middleware vendors that require you to rewrite your apps... TMA does not, it's still RV-based... just an FYI.

Anonymous said...

Good post Marc. Interesting comments by Brian, though I have to disagree with his assumption about "disturbing problems for other hardware-based middleware vendors." It's just not an issue. The important issue we have to address is whether the referenced vendor is hardware-accelerating an architecture that shouldn't be accelerated. More thoughts at www.tervela.com/blog-street-legal-messaging.