Comparing Tibco and NServiceBus

[David Madrian]

My company has adopted NServiceBus for some minor uses so far and continues to evaluate it for (hopefully!) more significant use.  One of the decision makers here has some knowledge about Tibco's products that provide messaging infrastructure and application integration.  He wants to understand how NServiceBus compares to Tibco's offerings.

I've done some searching but have not been able to find anything very helpful.  I think that the Tibco product people might most likely try to compare with NServiceBus would be their so-called ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks.  From their sales/marketing materials, I see that this product consists of what they call a service bus and process monitor.  They also provide various application adapters.  It sounds to me like ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks may be more of a broker-based product that's more comparable to BizTalk, but I don't want to characterize it incorrectly when I compare it to NServiceBus.  We are a 100% Microsoft/.NET shop, so I also suspect that some of the integration features of the Tibco products may not be so useful in my company.

Question: Can anyone point me to existing information or share personal knowledge that would help me compare and contrast these products?

Thanks!

David

[Kijana Woodard]

My involvement with Tibco was a few years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy. I didn't use the ActiveMatrix product you mentioned.

Tibco was much more primitive than what NServiceBus offers. By primitive, I mean that you have to build semantics and various facilities on top [retries for instance].

I did end up with a Satellite that connected nsb msmq endpoints with the broader Tibco-bound systems. https://github.com/kijanawoodard/NServiceBus.Tibco

The danger of Tibco, IMO, is that there is a natural tendency to put more and more "inside" the broker [you've spent so much money for it]. At some point you reach a tipping point where *change* becomes harder than ever because "making a change to tibco" risks breaking too many things.

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[daniel....@nservicebus.com]

Good morning David

Could you maybe enlighten us a bit more about your business domain and the challenges you want to address. I'm always very hesitant to compare products when I don't know the background.

Daniel

[David Madrian]

Thanks Kijana for confirming that Tibco is broker-style system.  It's also surprising that it would be so primitive, considering how expensive it is. 

David

On Wednesday, February 4, 2015 at 11:02:33 PM UTC-5, Kijana Woodard wrote:

My involvement with Tibco was a few years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy. I didn't use the ActiveMatrix product you mentioned.

Tibco was much more primitive than what NServiceBus offers. By primitive, I mean that you have to build semantics and various facilities on top [retries for instance].

I did end up with a Satellite that connected nsb msmq endpoints with the broader Tibco-bound systems. https://github.com/kijanawoodard/NServiceBus.Tibco

The danger of Tibco, IMO, is that there is a natural tendency to put more and more "inside" the broker [you've spent so much money for it]. At some point you reach a tipping point where *change* becomes harder than ever because "making a change to tibco" risks breaking too many things.

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 2:57 PM, David Madrian <davidm...@gmail.com> wrote:

My company has adopted NServiceBus for some minor uses so far and continues to evaluate it for (hopefully!) more significant use.  One of the decision makers here has some knowledge about Tibco's products that provide messaging infrastructure and application integration.  He wants to understand how NServiceBus compares to Tibco's offerings.

I've done some searching but have not been able to find anything very helpful.  I think that the Tibco product people might most likely try to compare with NServiceBus would be their so-called ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks.  From their sales/marketing materials, I see that this product consists of what they call a service bus and process monitor.  They also provide various application adapters.  It sounds to me like ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks may be more of a broker-based product that's more comparable to BizTalk, but I don't want to characterize it incorrectly when I compare it to NServiceBus.  We are a 100% Microsoft/.NET shop, so I also suspect that some of the integration features of the Tibco products may not be so useful in my company.

Question: Can anyone point me to existing information or share personal knowledge that would help me compare and contrast these products?

Thanks!

David

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[David Madrian]

Daniel, sure, I can provide some details about our business domain.  We are an investment firm that manages global equities for institutional investors.  Our investment process consists of several cooperating subsystems, each with their own business unit and dedicated software development teams.  We also import a large amount of data from vendors about market activities.  Our systems perform complex quantitative processes on the market data, factor in other complex client and regulatory restrictions, to generate trades.  Those trades are then executed in the markets.  We need these different sub-systems to cooperate in a more reactive way, rather than through batch jobs which push around large amounts of data.  We also need to integrate much more effectively (i.e. in a more loosely coupled manner) with some 3rd party applications that handle core parts of our investment process.  Our systems are nearly 100% .NET and Windows at this point, so we have really no cross-platform integration challenges. 

Hopefully, this provides enough context.  Let me know if there are other specific questions.

David

[Kijana Woodard]

Let me be clear about what I mean by "primitive". I mean "primitive" in the sense that int and bool are primitive to a programming language.

Tibco doesn't have much in the way of messaging semantics beyond Queue vs Topic[1].

It's more on the level of RabbitMQ or MSMQ than NServiceBus.

Out of the box, you get messages flying around. NServiceBus, on the other hand, guides you down a road of logical Publishers which, IMO, results in a more legible[2] system.

NServiceBus could probably run on top of Tibco given that Tibco has similar semantics to Azure's Bus.

"considering how expensive it is."

There is a large market for expensive products that are sold to people who will never to use them, and therefore, never live with the consequences. See SAP.

I believe there is [or was] another Tibco product called Rendezvous that was distributed and was, somehow, even more expensive.

1. Which I find annoying from a "client code" pov.
2. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/

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[Kijana Woodard]

I should also point out that Tibco's roots were in finance. It is [was?] very fast.
They later branched out into the BizTalk space. [I don't know how "fast" the broker product is relative to other MQs]

To that end, you can consider something like ZeroMQ for speed.

Again, you have to build up the messaging and business semantics on top.

NServiceBus prioritizes reliability over speed.

For a case where you are reading market data or high speed telemetry, "losing a message" is of little consequence because a replacement will be along in a few milliseconds.

For customer orders, it may be different.

Not sure if you're doing HFT, but I imagine that the portion of the system that uses NSB or a Tibco broker would be out the loop for HFT. My experience in the financial industry is just outside of the HFT space. Just got to peek over the wall at it. :-]

Since you mentioned batch jobs, I'm guessing the speed requirements are not "insane".