Anticipating a greater need for large-scale enterprise messaging, Software AG has rebranded its messaging software, integrated it with its Terracotta in-memory storage technology, and is now is pitching the product outside its initial market of large financial firms.
Terracotta Universal Messaging, formerly called webMethods Nirvana Messaging, could be of interest to utility companies, retail chains and other organizations that cull increasing amount of data from sensor networks and point-of-presence systems, said Eddie McDaid, Software AG's managing director for the Universal Messaging product.
The software could simplify the infrastructure, as well as filter and speed delivery of large amounts of data, often called big data. The software is also being integrated with Terracotta's own BigMemory in-memory data store, and will become a key part of Terracotta's In-Genius data analysis platform, due by the end of the year.
Multiple copies of server software, written in Java, could be run around the edge of a network, each collecting source data from multiple sources, and filtering the data and routing it "based on content and value," McDaid said.
The idea is to use the messaging platform to "create a cascading flow of relevant information that gets fed ever deeper into an organization," McDaid said. "The whole issue of big data is to not to overwhelm the internal networks. You could potentially do some of the work out at the edge."
The software was originally developed by an integrator for financial service firms, called my-Channels. For the technology, the company focused on developing a messaging platform with low latency and that could work with corporate firewalls, mostly by harnessing the HTTP and HTTPS protocols, McDaid said. "We designed the product so it could support lots of different transport protocols," McDaid said.
Software AG purchased my-Channels in 2012, and initially folded the product line into its webMethods, a web services company it acquired in 2007. Software AG acquired Terracotta in 2011.
Current customers of the platform, including Credit Suisse, UBM, Deutsch Band and Bank of America, will not notice any change in the product itself, other than the new name and the new set of Terracotta Technologies that Software AG's salespeople will introduce to them. The Software AG engineers working on the platform will be working within the Terracotta organizational structure.
The software offers a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) and connectors for enterprise clients running Java, Microsoft .Net, and Python; for Web clients running JavaScript, HTML5 or Silverlight; and for mobile clients such as Apple iOS devices, Android and Windows Phone 7. It works with many modern messaging protocols, such as MQTT and HTML5's WebSocket.
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