In December, when we first looked at TIBCO’s approach to support on the heels of so many acquisitions, its journey towards enabling real-time analytics had just begun. Earlier this week, we attended one of its five global TransForm events to learn more. There was a lot to digest, and we are likely to delve deeper over the next few months. Four main themes stood out as major developments:
- event enabled enterprise – TIBCO’s process automation software background gave it access to changes in business flows and it has adapted its portfolio to include not just automation but also event processing, analytics, cloud and social. New capabilities have been rolled out fast, and the pace does not appear to be slowing down. The combination of these capabilities is being branded as ‘event enablement’ – from capture to analysis, with a checklist for customers to assess readiness.
- machine to machine information exchange – the company believes that its real-time, event-enabled platform will help its customers unlock ‘situational awareness’ from smart, connected machines generating streams data. Its acquisition of LogLogic in April expands TIBCO’s operational intelligence offerings by providing customers the ability to proactively monitor real-time events, assess risks, and address opportunities often associated with ‘Big Data’
- mobile application development – That’s right, enterprise IT vendors can indeed produce tools to help their customers be nimble. Built on its Formvine technology, TIBCO aims to enable IT and business users to manage and share data in minutes with “drag-and-drop, point-and-click ease”. Combined with its Silver Mobile App available through the AppStore, enterprise customers can provide secure access to enterprise web components and services within a rich and integrated iOS environment. This combination exemplifies how enterprise IT can take advantage of consumerization – by choosing a public forum for distributing consumption clients.
- in-memory computing– TIBCO’s ActiveSpaces is targeted to help customers improve performance for any application that requires frequent, high-volume requests to large datasets stored in disk-based solutions such as databases. This is enabled by exploiting commodity hardware trends such as the abundance of main memory and multi-core architectures by accelerating the exchange and processing of data and transactions in real time.
A 600-person event also provides ample opportunity to mingle with other participants and assess sentiment. There were many line-of-business users who were responsible for maintaining their teams business process automation tools, and chose to attend TransForm to specifically learn more about other TIBCO technologies they could exploit. Also present were a number of freelance contractors who claim to have made a career for over a decade based solely on TIBCO products. Their confidence in the future supports our view that with this much expanded portfolio, TIBCO has created significant headroom for growth. It now needs to invest in segment-specific marketing to capitalise on this potential.
Image credit: Divine Proportion by Ned Lyttelton