TIBCO - more relevant today than ever
- Summary:
- TIBCO is at the nexus of trends that speak to the requirements of 21st century business. But it is much more than technology. Look closely at TIBCO customer relationships.
TIBCO has always been great at putting its customers front and center of its annual TUCON conference. There's a reason for that. CEO Vivek Ranadivé wants to make the world a better place. It helps that TIBCO is both profitable and is of sufficient size that it commands respect among some of the largest organizations in the world.
TIBCO was the original 'real time' vendor that for many years was focused on deep integration between disparate applications while enabling high speed data transfer and processing. Today, it is much more with a portfolio of solutions that are relevant for solving 21st century problems.
This week, TIBCO has been bigging up its Spotfire analytics solution and tibbr, its take on 'social collaboration for enterprise.' Talking to customers, Spotfire has proven to be a useful alternative to solutions like SAP BW. NXP Semiconductor for example told me about how they've reduced time to dashboard from weeks to hours. SBB talked about how analytics helps them predict congestion and conflicts on its static physical infrastructure that in turn drives increased business.
However, walking the halls I found that getting productive on Spotfire can be just as challenging as running any other large scale analytics platform. Customers also worry that Spotfire is not yet as scalable as they would like. But then as we talked through alternatives like Tableau and QlikView, it quickly became apparent that many of today's solutions are at the early stages of adequately scaling to meet the real needs of enterprise class analytics.
I've always had a soft spot for tibbr. This week's announcements of a partnership with Huddle alongside revealing CMS capability and curation with 'Pages' are solid steps in the right direction. Again, customers are enjoying the tibbr experience with long time partner Thomson Reuters talking about embedding tibbr in its partner collaboration solutions. Today, tibbr is counting 6.5 million paying customers including a long term and fruitful relationship with KPMG.But above these eyecatching announcements, I sense there are three more fundamental issues in play.
Integration is back again
Integration isn't going away. While many talk about cloud applications as being the future, few talk about the challenges of integration in anything more than a superficial way. On-premise, hybrid, pure play cloud landscapes suggest a much more complex set of integration problems than has previously existed. Add in the plethora of mobile devices coming onstream either through 'bring your own device' policies or the proliferation of sensors and you quickly see the potential for a seizing up of information rather then the freeing up of data promised by so many.
TIBCO's story is unique in that it is the Switzerland and Swiss Army knife of integration. This places it at the center of what should be large enterprise integration efforts going forward. The technology has been proven over decades, it only gets better and no other vendor I know is capable of bringing together so many data sources and applications under one infrastructure and in a robust manner. Other will argue that APIs are good enough. I don't think so. At best, an API approach is a Band Aid, not a suture. To put this in context, I noticed that Matt Quinn, TIBCO CTO said nonchalantly: "We'll process several thousand transactions per second." You cant do that purposefully without solid integration.
And if you listen closely to (pretty much) every customer talking at TUCON, underlying the narrative is a belief that TIBCO today acts as a platform from which it can build out 21st century capabilities. Purists will scream: 'Where's the PaaS, where's the IaaS story?' but that is to ignore the fact most buyers could care less about acronyms - they want to solve problems and achieve outcomes.
Loving customers, learning more
I've always felt that TIBCO is unique in positioning its customers at the center of what it does. What I didn't know is that companies like Nielsen and NXP have had TICO executives standing alongside them as their technology heads explain or pitch a solution.
Yesterday for instance, Mitchell Habib, COO Nielsen talked about how Vivek Ranadivé committed TIBCO to a Nielsen customer in providing a solution during in a competitive bid against BEA. It was clear that Nielsen values that depth of relationship adding that they value that above the usual vendor relationship which he characterized as being about 'selling us more.'
When you have roster of customers like that prepared to talk enthusiastically about how the vendor helps them with outcomes, then the marketing job is much easier.
On stage at the second day keynote, I was skeptical about the Sacramento Kings (part owned by Ranadivé) basketball panel being little more than a long run advert for TIBCO and an indulgence of its CEO, aided by a tame media person with scripted questions. I still feel that was a little overdone but then, as the company reps started talking about loyalty topics it suddenly struck me just how valuable that set up really was.
Years ago I remember getting excited about the Harrah's loyalty story. Recounting that in 2012 in the context of 'big data BS' , I said:
As I think about this topic I cannot help but go back to the Harrahs case study from ten plus years ago where CEO Gary Loveman applied his understanding of customer loyalty, developed during his tenure at MIT Sloane to the rejuvenation of a tired gaming hall and turned it into a gaming powerhouse. He understood the value of blended real time data coming from multiple sources. More important, he understood that data has to be actionable, business models have to be refined and processes need recasting to reflect the new information and what it is revealing.
For me, Loveman's story was all about true CRM and big data analytics decades before it was fashionable. But it required a truly visionary CEO to orchestrate what those concepts meant for it to deliver value based outcomes.
As the King's panel talked, it suddenly struck me that TIBCO is drawing upon 12 plus years' experience in the gaming industry and elsewhere while it learns by applying past learnings and new technology in its own back yard to help further customer interests. This is well beyond eating your own dog food.
Challenges ahead
A company that can count on loyal customers to stand on stage telling their unfolding stories year in and year out is rare. From that standpoint, TIBCO is in a unique position. If anything, the journey its customers describe rarely becomes dulled, even when partially repeated. However, TIBCO is not a panacea.
Integration remains a difficult and time consuming task. In this context, TIBCO should learn from customers like CIBC that have figured out how to solve process problems without boiling the ocean.
It is clear that despite having many of the platform pieces in place, TIBCO needs to rapidly develop scale out capability to make its platform approach more than well honed marketing messages.
Despite my personal affection for tibbr, I wonder whether those who understand 'process in context' will be as satisfied with the Switzerland positioning as those that are directly embedding collaboration into their applications. It all depends on the attitude of the business to its vendor relationships.
As I said last week, GE's vertical market play makes for a powerful play. TIBCO has solid history in several industries like financial services, energy utilities, high tech, telco, media and retail. Where else can it go?
Lastly, as a platform play, my sense is that TIBCO needs many more developer organizations than it counts today. That story was muted at this event.
Verdict
TIBCO is way more than the boring old messaging company it once was. Its combination of smart investments in enabling technologies, the new emphasis on 'big data' analytics and its application agnostic positioning make it much more attractive to large enterprise than it was just a few years ago. Add in a genuine concern for customer success and you'd be hard pressed to not like what you see. But don't get over enamored. TIBCO may be an attractive alternative to the lockin we see so often elsewhere but it ain't perfect yet.
Disclosure: TIBCO funded most of my T&E for attending TUCON