Tibco wants to Engage with being a service provider rather than a tech firm
- Summary:
- Tibco's Engage offering is a natural fit with elements of its broad range of tools and technologies, if they are integrated together in the right way.
[sws_grey_box box_size="690"]SUMMARY - Tibco's Engage offering is a natural fit with elements of its broad range of tools and technologies, if they are integrated together in the right way. [/sws_grey_box]
It's worth keeping an eye on some of the straight-down-the-line tech companies as they start to come to terms with what the cloud can really deliver, both for them and their customers.
Watch out, for example, how some of them will start building end-user facing SaaS services by integrating their technologies in the ways that they have spent years advising customers to do for themselves.
Tibco is one of the early protagonists here. Its first offering was business-oriented social media tool, Tibbr, but now it is set to get far more involved as a provider of SaaS services rather than simply a developer and vendor of technology tools. That is certainly the thinking behind its latest service introduced this week, Engage.
This targets the customer engagement piece of the increasingly complex task of attracting potential customers to part with money in exchange for products that they are either keen to buy or had not yet realised was a good idea.
It would be reasonable to think that this is not the natural stamping ground of a company like Tibco. But in practice, it is a natural fit with many elements of its broad range of tools and technologies, if they are integrated together in the right way. And this is now one of the company’s mainstream goals.
Leandro Perez, Tibco’s Director of Product Marketing, argues:
We are at the stage where we are now looking to make our solutions more acceptable to users and sometimes that means re-orienting the way we sell it, so it is easier for them to get into. That sometimes means coming out with a new product.
And that is what Engage is, it is not just an aggregation of existing tools. It pulls together all the elements of integration and analytics so that the users do not have to know how it works: they can just get the business benefit.
According to Perez there will be other products like this, so it now really is the start of a trend for the company. And now it does seem as though Tibco has got the taste for it as a delivery model for future services that it now has in mind.
What has driven the development of Engage are the problems big customers have in interacting with their customers who are now looking for these businesses to talk to them personally, as individuals, in whatever way is appropriate.
This is the omnichannel marketing piece where customers are expecting to get very tightly targeted marketing communications, a broad range of options in two-way communications between themselves and the customers– often using several options at once – and a level of service that says the vendor is thinking about just them and their needs.
This means getting texts telling them they are just passing a store that sells that product they thinking of buying and if they act now they can buy it a discount. This evolution is now underway, and it is one Tibco sees as an opportunity as it has the technologies to do it in its portfolio, and has the integration experience to make it happen.
Perez suggests that analyst opinion is that, while other vendors were already in the market with their own offerings in this area, none of them are doing it properly:
Our goal is to optimise customer engagement in real time, across any channel. For many of the established retailers and similar businesses this can now be a problem. Potential customers may be passing a store that has the very products an individual has browsed around, yet that retailer would not know this.
It is an opportunity to be grabbed if the retailer can then pull together the event data, social media analysis, geographic location data and the rest so they can suggest the customer `acts now’, in real time.
This is not an original line of thought, of course. Indeed, the company was pre-announcing the plan to enter this market at its Toucon event last October. And there are other vendors that can offer similar services.
But Perez contends that they each offer different pieces of the relevant technology:
If you look at how they are doing it they have either acquired a whole bunch of disparate technologies and are trying to stitch them together, or they have put them together in such a way that customers are using a collection of different pieces of technology; one company’s CRM, another’s email marketing, physical store and mail drop, and so on. It is completely uncoordinated and none of it works in real time.
A question of loyalty
There is an obvious issue here in that back in 2010 Tibco acquired Loyalty Lab, and much of the underlying technology and expertise of the new Engage offering comes from that source. Perez denies, however, that the company could stand accused of doing the same as others it accuses:
Unlike making an acquisition and then re-badging it, Engage is not Loyalty Lab. This is a brand new product. Loyalty Lab was a way of understanding the market and using their expertise.
Engage is a standalone SaaS offering that takes data feeds from a wide range of relevant applications and sources such as CRM, ecommerce, customer records systems, geospatial applications, and feeding it into an analytical engine that works on policies that the user has established.
It works with historical data about anything relevant to customer engagement – such as customer purchase frequency. Transaction level and social media histories where available, blended with historic sales data and real time data such as customer location, current special offers, current sales figures, stock locations and latest market trends.
Tibco has also observed a trend within companies that is rarely talked about, though often a cause of issues that can result in brand damage. Perez says:
One of the things we noted with social media is that everything is connected to everything else, so we have built systems that ensure all parts of a business can talk to all other parts. They can run their own communities themselves as well. Companies have been using Facebook for this, but it has algorithms which determine relevance and it decides who gets to see what. Companies are now looking to take back ownership of this.
Partnerships are an obvious component in developing a market for Engage, and Perez indicated there is already much activity in this area:
Absolutely it is on our mind, and we’ve got a team focused on integration, that is huge. We know we will need to be very connected and very seamless with applications that companies already use, so partnering with eCommerce vendors and file management providers is absolutely happening. But I won’t comment on names yet.
My take
This marks an early stage in the shift away from the traditional position of technology being seen as `very important’ for its own sake.
Tibco has had the makings for Engage for some time, but putting them together has either proved too difficult, time consuming or economically unjustifiable for most businesses to take the plunge.
But by engineering them into a service with an effective brand name the company has opened up a potential marketplace business users understand and exploit, and effectively ignore the technology behind it.
This is a penny that will now drop at many other established technology vendors, just so long as they can shake off the shackles that the words `our technology’ naturally create.