Sonic says it will offer Tibco customers "a competitive trade-up programme aimed at accelerating their transition from inflexible and expensive integration platforms of the past to a SOA platform based on Sonic ESB".

Describing Tibco's software as 'legacy EAI', Sonic says it will provide customers with licenses of its SOA product of equivalent capability to their currently deployed Tibco products, for a price equivalent to Tibco maintenance.

Greg O'Connor, president of Sonic Software, says: "Customers have paid multiple millions of dollars for enterprise licenses of Tibco products - with hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual maintenance fees. These customers are frustrated with the inadequate returns they have achieved with this traditional, centralised hub-and-spoke integration technology."

Sonic claims that Tibco customers who have purchased an enterprise licence for $1 million, for example, are typically paying as much as $250,000 or more in annual maintenance.

Under the programme, the vendor will deliver Sonic SOA Suite licenses to replace Tibco products such as Rendezvous, Enterprise Message Service (EMS), BusinessWorks and StaffWare.

Tibco last year resorted to the law courts in an attempt to force Sonic to withdraw a white paper containing benchmark results that compared Java Message Service capabilities of Sonic's SonicMQ and Tibco's Enterprise for JMS.

Sonic's latest marketing wheeze will be deeply unsettling for Tibco, which is currently overhauling its European operations following a poor set of first quarter results.

According to a recent report by Computerwire, Tibco is considering branding either its BusinessWorks or EMS products as an ESB, or as being ESB-based, in an effort to play catch-up with rivals who have adopted the terminology. The vendor nonetheless maintains that its product suite more than matches the ESBs for functionaliy.