Middleware company Tibco Software Inc has a new 4.0 release of its TIB/Rendezvous publish-and-subscribe software as a push-based messaging service that can now support request/reply, one-of-N delivery, fault-tolerance and load balancing. Tibco claims other messaging technologies such as IBM MQSeries, Microsoft Falcon and BEA MessageQ require systems to poll – or pull – message requests from clients, resulting in outdated messages and inefficient use of bandwidth, especially in high-volume applications environments such as web servers and data warehouses. Tibco says TIB/Rendezvous pushes message to servers asynchronously and ensures each request is only handled once, by using a server- based scheduler to queue messages for clients, which also provides a higher degree of availability by publishing messages through servers according to their existing workloads. The software is now up on MVS and OS/400 in addition to Unix and Microsoft. Prices start at $2,500 for the developer kit – $600 per runtime client. TIB/Rendezvous uses the company’s own object request broker – TIB/ObjectBus – or will run atop third party ORBs where required. Tibco’s looking to extend the ORB on to all platforms now supported by TIB/Rendezvous. Tibco and Cisco Systems Inc – which recently purchased a minority holding in the Reuters plc subsidiary – are modifying their respective internet protocol (IP) multicasting technologies to create a single specification for reliable multicasting – include subject addressing – they will submit for standardization to the Internet Engineering Task Force sometime next year. It appears as if Tibco’s close to winning push technology vendor Marimba Inc as a customer for its multicasting technology.
