FRAMINGHAM (04/26/2000) - Tibco Software will ship next month its first products designed to let different Web commerce systems work together.
Tibco ActiveExchange will initially have two applications.
For complex, real-time transactions between companies, there is TIB/BusinessConnect. The application is a set of server programs and GUI tools that let companies create a set of Web interactions and then link these with their internal order management, inventory and other enterprise applications.
BusinessConnect relies on the software infrastructure of Tibco's flagship set of system software, Tibco ActiveEnterprise. The latter product contains a group of programs for creating complex interactions among an array of enterprise applications. More recently, Tibco has been adding modeling and other tools to make it simpler to build automated business processes from these interactions.
The second application in ActiveExchange is TIB/BusinessPartner, which lets a company interact with suppliers or other partners that don't have Web commerce capabilities of their own. This server program can run on a server at the partner site and manage transactions between the partner site and the Web commerce site. Among other things it can convert one company's XML documents into specific flat file or database formats that are understandable by the partner's applications.
Both BusinessConnect and BusinessPartner support a range of Web commerce and security standards, including RosettaNet, cXML, Microsoft's BizTalk server, SSL, and x.509 certificates.
Pricing varies based on the number of applications involved in the transactions, and can be licensed on a per-server or per-user basis.
Tibco in June will ship PortalBuilder 2.0, a development tool for building Web sites, or portals, that gather together in HTML documents a wide range of data and other content, drawn from many sources. PortalBuilder is part of the TIB/ActivePortal product, which offers several applications for creating and managing these sites.
Version 2.0 will support the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) and Small Message Service (SMS) formats, so that the portal content can be displayed on an array of handheld wireless devices such as handset or interactive pagers.
Also new will be a feature to pull content into the site in response to a client request and an alert service that can send high priority information directly to the client devices, without waiting for a request.
Tibco, Palo Alto, Calif.: +1-650-846-1000 and www.tibco.com.