Middleware in the context of distributed applications is software that provides services beyond those provided by the operating system to enable the various components of a distributed system to communicate and manage data. Middleware supports and simplifies complex distributed applications. It includes web servers, application servers, messaging and similar tools that support application development and delivery. Middleware is especially integral to modern information technology based on XML, SOAP, Web services, and service-oriented architecture.
Message-oriented middleware (MOM) is software or hardware infrastructure supporting sending and receiving messages between distributed systems. Message-oriented middleware is in contrast to streaming-oriented middleware where data is communicated as a sequence of bytes with no explicit message boundaries. Note that streaming protocols are almost always built above protocols using discrete messages such as frames (Ethernet), datagrams (UDP), packets (IP), cells (ATM), et al.
Tuxedo is a middleware platform used to manage distributed transaction processing in distributed computing environments. Tuxedo is a transaction processing system or transaction-oriented middleware, or enterprise application server for a variety of systems and programming languages. Developed by AT&T in the 1980s, it became a software product of Oracle Corporation in 2008 when they acquired BEA Systems. Tuxedo is now part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware.
In the fields of information technology and systems management, application performance management (APM) is the monitoring and management of the performance and availability of software applications. APM strives to detect and diagnose complex application performance problems to maintain an expected level of service. APM is "the translation of IT metrics into business meaning ."
Passive monitoring is a technique used to capture traffic from a network by copying traffic, often from a span port or mirror port or via a network tap. It can be used in application performance management for performance trending and predictive analysis. Passive monitoring is also used in web performance optimization in the form of real user monitoring. E-commerce and media industries use real user monitoring to correlate site performance to conversions and engagement.
Oracle Fusion Middleware consists of several software products from Oracle Corporation. FMW spans multiple services, including Java EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management. FMW depends on open standards such as BPEL, SOAP, XML and JMS.
Business transaction management (BTM), also known as business transaction monitoring, application transaction profiling or user defined transaction profiling, is the practice of managing information technology (IT) from a business transaction perspective. It provides a tool for tracking the flow of transactions across IT infrastructure, in addition to detection, alerting, and correction of unexpected changes in business or technical conditions. BTM provides visibility into the flow of transactions across infrastructure tiers.
Application service management (ASM) is an emerging discipline within systems management that focuses on monitoring and managing the performance and quality of service of business transactions.
Middleware analysts are computer software engineers with a specialization in products that connect two different computer systems together. These products can be open-source or proprietary. As the term implies, the software, tools, and technologies used by Middleware analysts sit "in-the-middle", between two or more systems; the purpose being to enable two systems to communicate and share information.
Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, enabling technologies are often used with BPM.
Composite Software, Inc. was previously a privately held data virtualization software company based in San Mateo, California. Composite Software was founded in October 2001 by Michael R. Abbott. In 2003, former Active Software founder and webMethods CTO, Jim Green joined Composite Software as CEO. On July 30, 2013, Composite Software was acquired by Cisco Systems for approximately US $180 million. Then on October 5, 2017, TIBCO purchased what was Composite Software from Cisco.
AppDynamics is a full-stack application performance management (APM) and IT operations analytics (ITOA) company based in San Francisco. The company focuses on managing the performance and availability of applications across cloud computing environments, IT infrastructure, network architecture, digital user experience design, application security threat detection, observability, and data centers. In March 2017, AppDynamics was acquired by Cisco for $3.7 billion. The software intelligence platform is used in enterprise and public sector SaaS applications such as the financial service sector, healthcare, telecom, manufacturing, and government for full-stack observability and IT infrastructure monitoring.
Carrier IQ was a privately owned mobile software company founded in 2005 in Sunnyvale, California. It provided diagnostic analysis of smartphones to the wireless industry via the installation of software on the user's phone, typically in a manner that cannot be removed without rooting the phone. The company says that its software is deployed in over 150 million devices worldwide.
Middleware is a type of computer software program that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue".
GigaSpaces Technologies Inc., is a privately held software company, established in 2000, with its headquarters located in New York City, and additional offices in Europe, Asia, and Israel.
In the fields of Information Technology (IT) and Systems Management, IT operations analytics (ITOA) is an approach or method to retrieve, analyze, and report data for IT operations. ITOA may apply big data analytics to large datasets to produce business insights. In 2014, Gartner predicted its use might increase revenue or reduce costs. By 2017, it predicted that 15% of enterprises will use IT operations analytics technologies.
Dynatrace, Inc. is a global technology company that provides a software observability platform based on artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Dynatrace technologies are used to monitor, analyze, and optimize application performance, software development and security practices, IT infrastructure, and user experience for businesses and government agencies throughout the world.
Apama is a complex event processing (CEP) and event stream processing (ESP) engine, developed by Software AG. Apama serves as a platform for performing streaming analytics over a range of high volume/low latency inputs and applications, such as IoT devices, financial exchanges, fraud detection, social media and similar. Users can define data patterns to listen for and actions to take when these patterns are found, which are defined in the provided domain-specific language called the Event Processing Language (EPL). The core Apama engine is written in C++; the process can also optionally contain a JVM for interacting with user created Java code. Apama focuses on high throughput, low latency and memory efficient performance; used in both Intel benchmarks and smaller machines such as the Raspberry Pi, routers and other Edge/IoT devices. It is particularly noteworthy within the CEP space as being one of the earliest projects, a long term market leader, and innovator of many patents.
ModelOps, as defined by Gartner, "is focused primarily on the governance and lifecycle management of a wide range of operationalized artificial intelligence (AI) and decision models, including machine learning, knowledge graphs, rules, optimization, linguistic and agent-based models" in Multi-Agent Systems. "ModelOps lies at the heart of any enterprise AI strategy". It orchestrates the model lifecycles of all models in production across the entire enterprise, from putting a model into production, then evaluating and updating the resulting application according to a set of governance rules, including both technical and business key performance indicators (KPI's). It grants business domain experts the capability to evaluate AI models in production, independent of data scientists.
In IT operations, software performance management is the subset of tools and processes in IT Operations which deals with the collection, monitoring, and analysis of performance metrics. These metrics can indicate to IT staff whether a system component is up and running (available), or that the component is behaving in an abnormal way that would impact its ability to function correctly—much like how a doctor may measure pulse, respiration, and temperature to measure how the human body is "operating". This type of monitoring originated with computer network components, but has now expanded into monitoring other components such as servers and storage devices, as well as groups of components organized to deliver specific services and Business Service Management).
