TibcoNow - building an edge innovation playground
- Summary:
- Martin Banks finds innovation on the agenda at the TibcoNow conference in Las Vegas.
This fact is what makes the appearance of Tibco Labs at the company’s annual TibcoNow conference a potentially important step, for it provides a place where enterprises can go `play’ with ideas and technologies in order to make sense of the coming complexities and create innovations that add real value, rather than just make shiny new gizmos.
The hot news from the company’s perspective, as announced by Chief Operating Officer Matt Quinn, was a significant upgrade of its key analytics tool, Spotfire. To be sure, the announcement is important and extends its capabilities significantly while, with the use of natural language query, also makes building new analyses a great deal easier.
There were a large clutch of other upgrade and enhancement announcements concerning other tools from the Tibco product range, and it was possible to see how these could be fitted together to help advance the underlying theme of the conference – delivering the tools needed to help users innovate new capabilities and services out at the network edge, where much of the real work is done.
And then along came the 'glue' that offers users the potential to make some real sense of the `how’, `why’, `when’, `where’ and `why bother’ aspects of the innovation process……a new collaborative consultation and partnering program known as Tibco Labs. This is the new baby of Matt Quinn’s successor as Tibco Chief Technology Officer, Nelson Petracek:
The Labs will be a customer and partner-facing service that will work with them in a number of different ways. Some projects will be us working with one company to help meet specific goals while others, particularly in the open source space, will be community collaborations. And some will be initiated by the customers coming to us with an idea for an innovation, or just some background research on how a technology can be used, while others will stem from ideas that have emerged from Tibco itself. We have already launched a number of specific, general-use projects that any company – not just existing customers – can look at and start to work with.
Innovation, who needs it?
This service is designed to target a growing issue for many enterprises – an issue quite probably born of the IT vendor community’s fondness for picking on words that have a certain resonance amongst users, and then hyping the hell out of them. For example, 2017 was definitely the year of being 'disruptive'; if your business was not disrupting something then, ipso facto, it must be a failure in some way.
This year the over-hyped word-du-jour is 'innovation'. If your company is not innovating frantically it must be doomed. One interesting sub-plot here is that Thomas Been, Tibco’s Chief Marketing Officer, spent some time earlier this year organising a major customer survey on the subject of innovation and the results were telling. While just shy of half the sample was committed to programs of innovation, over 80% of those businesses reported themselves as disappointed with the results of said innovation.
So one of the roles seen for Tibco Labs will be in helping enterprises identify and define the areas of their business where innovation can make a positive impact on the business and create new value, both in direct monetary terms and in the development of new business or operational processes. As Petrachek told the conference audience:
Innovation is not about making something shiny and new just so you can have something shiny and new. It can just as easily be about using a piece of new technology to make an existing process easier to work with or product easier to manufacture.
An example of this can be seen in one of the first general-use projects launched as part of Tibco Labs. This is Project Dovetail, which is targeting one of the early applications areas for Blockchain technologies – smart contracts, and is using a combination of a browser-based graphical interface and a rules-based interface based on the companies existing (and updated as part of this year’s round of product upgrades) Flogo microservices builder. These two modelling tools are being evaluated for their ability to make smart contracts easier to write, visualise, test, and audit without needing deep programming experience.
The Blockchain mega-hype
As recently pointed out by Denis Howlett, while the Blockchain hype-meters continue to register maximum, there is still little sign that real levels of usability have yet been reached. The lack of compatibility between different implementations of Blockchain are such that there is currently no scope that applications developed using different technologies will work together.
According to Petrachek this is one of the reasons the smart contracts application was selected:
We wanted to try for a write-once, deploy-many capability. We have selected two Blockchain technologies to start with and have tools in which a smart contract can be written and then ported to either or both environments.
He acknowledged that this is only a first step, and still some way from providing a real time bridge between different Blockchain technologies, but it is a goal that the Dovetail Project is heading towards.
The other initial projects coming from the Labs include Cloud Conversations, designed to provide an environment where users can ask questions and gain deeper knowledge and insights through new methods of exploring and interacting with data.
Then there's the My Partner App, designed for use with the Tibco Cloud service, is setting out to investigate how businesses can improve collaboration with their business partners, speed up the resolution of requests, and streamline interactions, and enable quick and effective decision-making. Another project designed to work with Tibco’s Cloud service is a Risk Investigation App aimed at finding new ways to exchange data and insights between customers, partners, and governing bodies, and build greater trust though information sharing.
Other announcements at the conference were mainly in the update/upgrade category, though some of those updates and upgrades are quite significant. The latest version of the company’s Spotfire analytics system brings what it claims is an industry first by adding AI-driven analytics capabilities. Known as the A(X) version, it adds machine-learning-based guidance that can recommend data relationships and uncover patterns for users.
It also features native support for real-time, streaming data from any source through a new module, Spotfire Data Streams. This provides 80 streaming sources such as the OSIsoft PI software and WITSML for oil and gas; Bloomberg, Reuters, and FIX for financial services; and Tibco Messaging (including support for Apache Kafka and Eclipse Mosquitto) and others for IoT.
One feature the company is particularly proud of is its ability to work with both real time and historical data in the same analytical model, so that real time events can be analysed in an historical context.
The company is also extending its partnership with Amazon Web Services by starting to make its Data Science tools available through the AWS Marketplace. These tools allow data scientists to share and collaborate using big data, and machine learning capabilities, while eliminating complex coding. This ia expected to open up the market for what the company called `citizen data scientists’ by making it easy to develop code-free workflows that support data transformation and machine learning, in addition to deep integration with Jupyter Notebooks.
There are also additional capabilities coming for the Tibco Connected Intelligence Cloud (TCIC), intended to provide users with functions such as business event processing, full lifecycle APIs, and visual analytics. One of the most interesting of these is AuditSafe, which is currently coming available in Beta form. This aimed at an important potential weakness of cloud-delivered services, the inability to know what is happening with or the status of documents and files as they move between applications and services in the cloud, especially when those movements involve physical movement between business partners and the like.
AuditSafe is aimed a providing the ability to have an immutable cloud-based audit ledger, based on the company’s own Blockchain network, Blocklayer.
My take
This year’s conference sees Tibco continuing to beaver away at filling in the services needed to bring the network edges and core services of the enterprise into a virtual `whole’, and this is increasingly important as the potential for `dismembering’ enterprise data centers and putting the resources around the network where the work is done continues to grow.
The inevitable stumbling block for such a trend, however, is the significant increase in infrastructure complexity. This is where the appearance of Tibco Labs – an environment where enterprises can inquire, experiment and generally `suck it and see’ if, where and how greater movement and innovation out at the edge will add value to their businesses – is an important `playground’ for the enterprise community.