How to Better Integrate Cloud Apps by Managing the Integration Lifecycle
At the TIBCO Now Tour this week, TIBCO Software announced a lightweight platform for creating, governing and consuming APIs in the cloud and new a cloud service designed to manage the continuous delivery of applications.
After acquiring the Mashery API management platform last summer, TIBCO Software is clearly making an effort to extend the reach of its integration platforms in the age of the API economy. Kevin Bohan, product marketing manager for integration technologies at TIBCO Software, says rather than deploying API management software on premise, the TIBCO Cloud Integration service provides access to an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environment to manage the entire API development and deployment lifecycle.
At the same time, Bohan says the new TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition enables business to update cloud applications using a streamlined version of existing TIBCO software that has been optimized to run on an instance of the open source Cloud Foundry PaaS.
Bohan says TIBCO Software as a whole is extending the reach of its traditional integration capabilities into the realm of APIs, which have become the new default mechanism for integrating applications both inside and outside of the enterprise.
The end goal, adds Bohan, is to enable professional developers with varying degrees of expertise to use different classes of tools to integrate applications at almost any level, while giving IT organizations a framework to manage all those applications that is agile enough to keep up with app development activity.
Of course, there’s no shortage of API management frameworks inside and outside of the cloud these days. But given the history of Mashery in the API management space and the fact that most IT organizations are still in the early stages of making use of APIs to interconnect internal applications, TIBCO Software clearly has the potential to become a serious player in the API economy.
