TIBCO BusinessWorks is an immensely powerful business process automation tool, enterprise integration product. It enables developers to create new services, model their business processes and integrate applications.
Automation of business activities is a goal that many organisations strive for but never really achieve.
TIBCO BusinessWorks aim is to provide a means for applications to interact in order to vastly increase the amount of integration between business applications and thus automate processes where it simply wasn't possible in the past.
The core of the system is the engine that drives the execution of the various processes. This engine is controlled via rules that you define via the GUI-based user interface.
TIBCO BusinessWorks - the ‘adaptors’ that exist to allow it to communicate with external applications. Many of these are application-specific, such as the interfaces to JD Edwards, SAP, PeopleSoft, Remedy, Siebel et al, but many are simply implementations of protocols (HTTP, LDAP, SMTP, SNMP, SOAP, TCP/IP, etc) which give you the basis upon which you can build your own connectors. Say, for example, that the API to your CRM system is based on an IP socket, with requests and responses presented in XML structures; BusinessWorks does all the nasty IP control for you, and can parse and unwrap the XML in order to extract the data. The list of connectors runs to two pages in the brochure and as far as the application-specific items go, the big names are pretty well covered in fields such as ERP, CRM, relational databases, GIS, trading systems and financial services packages.
Reference: Techworld
