Following the acquisition of Borland, customers could be forgiven for doubting the future of VisiBroker - one of the market leading middleware products for developing and deploying distributed computer applications.
But they don’t have to be concerned. Micro Focus very much sees VisiBroker (and its associated products, including VisiSecure, VisiNotify and VisiTransact) as an integral part of the strategy going forward and is actively supporting the continued investment in future releases, with new versions in the pipeline.
VisiBroker is a mature technology, created in the mid 90’s, and is a highly prolific middleware software product, with more than 30 million licences in use worldwide by all manner of organisations.
Yet, VisiBroker is largely unheard of outside of the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) community, albeit that it’s the most widely deployed ORB (Object Request Broker) infrastructure product on the market. So why is this? Simply because VisiBroker comes into play behind the scenes – helping to solve very real business problems.
What’s the business problem?
Dave Stringer, VisiBroker Product Manager, at Micro Focus, describes a Distributed System as "a number of computers connected by a network in conjunction with the software running on them. The degree to which they are coupled may vary. It is middleware that provides the integration allowing the constituents to be reasoned about as a system."
The problem with Enterprise Distributed Systems is that the constituent parts of that system are created and hosted using heterogeneous development languages, platforms and technologies. Yet, in order for the system to work, all of these constituent parts need to interact with one another. Furthermore, once these systems can interoperate, there is a significant requirement for the highest levels of scalability, performance, availability, security and consistency across that communication. It’s these issues that make up the ‘headache’ that the system architect lives and breathes every day.
So, what is VisiBroker?
In its simplest terms, VisiBroker (with its development and deployment capabilities) acts as a communication link between the various parts of an Enterprise Distributed System, translating and sending messages swiftly, efficiently and securely back and forth between those disparate applications created in different languages, hosted on different platforms and sitting on different hardware. So, with VisiBroker, systems architects can truly realise systems where the engineering optimisations needed are not feasible with other technologies.
A great example of its use is in the telecommunications industry where VisiBroker has been deployed on a network of mobile telephone masts, scattered across a wide geographical area, to feedback to a central support system (also hosting VisiBroker) to immediately report technical faults where they occur. These highly secure messages are automatically prioritised rapidly and efficiently over others on the network to ensure the faults are reported in a timely manner enabling the business to take the appropriate action to remedy the problem and ensuring the highest level of customer availability.
As well as the telecommunications, VisiBroker has been deployed across many vertical markets e.g. financial services, public sector, manufacturing, utilities, pharmaceuticals and even the military.
Further information on VisiBroker
If you would like to speak to someone about VisiBroker and its associated products, please
call:
Europe, Middle East Africa, and India
Mark Chapman: +44 7887 890 361
USA
Bill Killen: +1 978 484 6498
ASIA & South America
Russell Baker: +1 805 202 9237
Or, if you would like to trial the product or simply require more information, please click the links below:
