Tibco held its TUCON user conference this week in Las Vegas. Key among the news announcements being proffered forth were technologies designed to help build what the firm defines as the "social enterprise" and the collaboration applications operating within it.
NOTE: The firm's name TIBCO stands for The Information Bus Company.
Tibco has created a new partner ecosystem for its tibbr social enterprise collaboration tool, which has been described as "Facebook for the enterprise" by various company executives. Launched less than two years ago, tibbr comes out of the firm's heritage in integration "supporting transactional systems bidirectionally", a technology layer intended to make it easy for users to act upon information in context to get work done.
As part of the new apps vision, Tibco insists that it will now enable developers to create rich social applications through the tibbr Enterprise Social Graph API. It will also offer programmers access to start integrating with apps from a "curated" marketplace.
"The tibbr ecosystem is being built around an open API and a flexible, customizable platform that delivers the right information to the right person in the right context at the right time," said Ram Menon, president of social computing, TIBCO.
"[But more than this...] people are the new API in business software and we believe this is at the core of a new and evolving human enterprise. The Enterprise Social Graph API can be leveraged by in-house developers, partners, and third-party developers," he added.
The app vision for tibbr includes Open Market: a new apps marketplace for tibbr planned to allow companies to "organize, manage, and curate" the apps that are distributed to users. For users, they will be able to discover and access both apps and services as well as activity streams.
Tibco hopes that software providers will use the tibbr API to integrate apps into the platform. Partners writing to the API include Box, Badgeville, Wayin, Teamly, BrightIdea, Fileboard, and Whodini.
Also announced this week is Tibco Silver Mobile 1.0, the firm's new mobile application development and management software for developing mobile applications. In addition, the company announced TIBCO Silver Fabric 5.0, the latest version of the company's cloud platform to enable a new Platform-as-a-Service operations model.
The firm says that this new release will help developers marry the agility of the cloud with enterprise-class software infrastructure platforms, enterprise security, and oversight, while benefiting from a user-centric platform that enables faster development across devices. This release introduces a client interface where developers can create, deploy, and manage applications on a selection of popular mobile platforms.
