Tibco is taking a language-independent approach to deploying service-oriented architectures (SOAs) with the release of its ActiveMatrix product family.

ActiveMatrix keeps business logic applications written in Java or .Net in virtual “containers” that allow centralised governance policies to be applied.

“The first wave of SOA has been about unbundling logic and creating a service but the other, bigger problem is service deployment,” said Ram Menon, Tibco marketing vice-president.

“It takes 40 to 50 lines of code to write a piece of business logic but 80 lines to deploy it because of the number of services that exist, who can access them and how they are governed.”

Neil Macehiter of analyst Macehiter Ward-Dutton said, “It’s pretty ambitious and technically challenging but if Tibco pulls this off it’s in a very interesting position. Companies usually need a fair amount of manual effort in terms of deploying services and Tibco is attempting to provide language-neutral containers that manage service deployment for you. It’s promising something similar to what Corba promised.”

However, Macehiter warned that Tibco’s role could be limited by enterprise giants that own tools and software stacks and are moving deeper into the integration space.