News

Tibco, GemStone build real-time integration platform

• By Rich Seeley
• May 21, 2003

In the post 9-11 era, federal intelligence agencies are looking for ways to get faster access to information from a variety of data sources scattered throughout the country.

At the request of a Department of Defense customer, Raba Technologies LLC (www.raba.com), a Columbia, Md.-based systems integrator, has created a framework using real-time messaging and data caching to provide fast access to data for intelligence applications.

Tibco Software Inc. (www.tibco.com), Palo Alto, Calif., and GemStone Systems Inc. (www.gemstone.com), Beaverton, Ore., announced this week that they are collaborating with Raba to provide real-time integration, messaging and data caching software for the framework.

The three companies are collaborating on the technology integration, sales and marketing of the Enterprise Services Solution (ESS), according to Jason Quan, director of marketing at GemStone. The companies unveiled their ESS effort this week at the Homeland Security Summit held in Arlington, Va.

As it is envisioned, ESS will integrate Tibco's messaging and middleware with GemStone's GemFire data caching technology using a portal based on WebLogic from BEA Systems and running on a Grid computing environment, Quan explained.

ESS will provide users with continuous access to real-time information automatically cached with GemFire's data loaders from a variety of databases without requiring database access coding in the applications, explained Mike Nastos, solutions architect at GemStone. This will simplify the job of application developers, he added.

"The application programming model for the cache is very simple and abstracts away all of the specifics of the database access," Nastos explained. "It also tends to provide a buffering layer in two senses. One, in the obvious sense that the application has continuous access to data and [two,] in the development sense it becomes unnecessary to have all of the ugly details of the data access scattered throughout the application code."

Beyond federal government agencies, the three companies plan to market ESS to the civilian sector, targeting the financial services industry with its need for business intelligence, GemStone's Quan said.