TIBCO Software Inc. announced the availability of a distributed service container -- TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid -- for creating and deploying services in a heterogeneous environment. This offering represents one in a family of service-oriented architecture (SOA) products designed to help reduce SOA complexity and simplify the deployment of new business services through service virtualization and governance.

TIBCO claims that traditional approaches to SOA are not designed to deal with the inherent heterogeneity of most IT environments. The reality is that most companies have a variety of technology platforms in place, including Java, Java EE, .NET, C++, and many more. This fact greatly complicates the time and effort involved in service creation and deployment. As a result, efforts to realize the full benefits of SOA have been stymied. TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid addresses this complexity by providing distributed service containers for the creation and deployment of reusable services in a virtualized manner.

"As SOA initiatives evolve, organizations are looking to develop new services," said Neil Macehiter, research director at Macehiter Ward-Dutton. "These efforts are highlighting a number of technology gaps in areas such as service deployment and lifecycle management, which have to be plugged manually leading to inconsistency and additional cost and risk. Service infrastructure must evolve to address these limitations if organisations are to maximise the return from their investments in SOA."

TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid is a unified service container which supports service run-time environments including Java and .NET, with existing plans to support C++, Perl, Ruby and COBOL. Using this product, developers can write services from scratch or take an existing service such as Enterprise Java Beans on IBM WebSphere or BEA WebLogic and expose or deploy them as managed services within the ActiveMatrix Service Grid.

ActiveMatrix Service Grid, based on the Java Specification Request (JSR) 208 and Service Component Architecture (SCA) specifications, also allows organizations to add their own service run-time environments. The product enables SOA-specific functionality such as policy management, service deployment, and service management to be configured at runtime by administrators.

ActiveMatrix Service Grid enables companies to achieve extreme scalability by providing an open, extensible service container based on the proven foundation of TIBCO's messaging and Enterprise Service Bus technology. With ActiveMatrix Service Grid, companies can automatically deploy services across machines or co-locate them within an operating system process, dynamically move services to different machines, and add distributed load balancing or fault tolerance. Administrators can add protocols such as SOAP over JMS, HTTP, WS-ReliableMessaging, and TIBCO Rendezvous at runtime through configuration without requiring redeployment.

"An organization's competitiveness and survival hinges on the free flow of information and services and how quickly they can react to change," said Jeff Kristick, senior director, product marketing, TIBCO. "Allowing functionality to be container-managed and not hard-coded reduces integration burdens, increases reuse and ultimately improves business responsiveness by ensuring developers can easily create and deploy interoperable services."

TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid is now available to the public.