TiVo records 75% gains in development productivity with Mule ESB Enterprise
As a pioneer home entertainment and the creator of the world’s first digital video recorder (DVR), a large part of TiVo’s business comes from partnerships with leading entertainment and technology companies, including DirectTV, Virgin Media, Roxio and HP, among others. TiVo works with these partners to provide partner-branded set-top boxes that embed TiVo’s DVR technology and tie back to TiVo’s datacenter for services such as authentication, software updates and programming schedules.
TiVo’s infrastructure includes over 40 web services that provide these services for both TiVo and its partners. Prior to implementing Mule, TiVo integrated these web services in a point-to-point fashion using custom Java code.
With the number of services increasing, the infrastructure grew in complexity, becoming more and more brittle. Every new service re-quired an exorbitant amount of development effort and was difficult to maintain. Even simple configuration changes presented a problem - because of all the dependencies introduced by the point-to-point architecture, any change to the system would trigger changes that cascaded throughout the application. Because of the complexity, developers would need to meticulously test the entire system, making sure that the change didn’t have unintended consequences.
As its growth continued to accelerate and new partners came on board, TiVo realized that it could not scale with the status quo - it needed a new architecture and integration model that could help in getting new partners up and running faster, reduce development costs and ease the maintenance burden over time. The company made a strategic decision to move towards a service-oriented architecture (SOA), with an enterprise service bus (ESB) at its core.