Tibco Software is focusing on latency and performance in an upgrade to its Tibco Rendezvous messaging software.

Available Tuesday, Rendezvous 8 lowers latency down to small milliseconds in the publishing of messages. "We're reducing the latency by up to 30 percent," said Jeff Kristick, Tibco vice president of marketing.

With Rendezvous 8, the company is looking to meet the needs of customers in SOA or in applications like financial services.

"A key area for Tibco is obviously financial services, and financial services is very much focused on the latency of transactions, and they measure that in milliseconds," Kristick said. Also, messaging is the transport layer for a lot of transactions and interactions in SOA, he said.

An analyst had high hopes for Tibco's product.

"[Rendezvous 8.0] will help Tibco re-capture the performance leadership position in the market for event-driven middleware, which is critical for the company's long-term success," said analyst Maureen Fleming, program director for business process automation and application deployment at IDC.

"Message-oriented middleware has been around for a long time, and Tibco, for all intents and purposes, invented this type of middleware," she said.

To reduce latency, Tibco deployed what it calls an In-Process Module, which eliminates the need to work through a Rendezvous Daemon to publish messages. With this module, Rendezvous protocols can be coded inside an application.

Rendezvous can interface to Java Message Service systems. It also could be used as a transport layer between Web services and a proprietary back-end application. 

Tibco also has optimized Rendezvous to work with networking cards including Infiniband and HP cards.