TIBCO Transform 2013 kicked off this morning in Paris, led by Matt Langdon, SVP of strategic operations and CMO, who gave his thoughts on big data — the hottest topic across the world’s enterprises and governments.
Langdon acknowledged that big data is an an important topic for many in the room and that the biggest challenge we share is in getting beyond the hype and into a discussion where we have a solid, collective understanding of how to leverage investment in TIBCO to solve the biggest challenges.
He first made the case for big data’s need for data and analytics as follows:
“Fundamentally we believe that when companies inject data and analytics deep into their operations, they can deliver productivity and profit gains that can significantly outpace its competition, and this type of big opportunity goes beyond the hype and instead is grounded in selecting the right approach, tools and technology to help you transform your big data projects into the kinds of profit opportunities we see in our customers around the world.”
Langdon went on to say that press attention, venture capital dollars and hype have been poured into products like Map Reduce, and Hadoop, first developed for rapidly growing, data-fed companies like Facebook and Google.
Beyond Hadoop
With that said, Langdon made a critical argument that often gets lost in the big data shuffle:
“But at the same time we also believe that to truly capture the big opportunity that big data presents that enterprise companies and our customers have to move beyond a narrow technology perspective centered around Hadoop and instead move to a model that encompasses a platform view of Big Data – including real-time integration of different data sources, systems and application data, visual analytics to examine, parse and uncover actionable insight and a event centric infrastructure model that allows our customers to fundamentally see what is happening in there business at a given time.”
He went on to say that the single-most important thing to come from the day would be the unique TIBCO proposition for big data, big data projects and investments. In Langdon’s words, “…for enterprise organizations to truly transform big data into big opportunity, you have to both undersand the past AND anticipate the future.”
Key to this is having the infrastructure and integration technology to create a holistic view of all of the available information in the organization: customer behavior, market trends and opportunities, inventory data, machine data – all of this information needs to be understood. He pointed out that TIBCO also has an analytics platform that enables business users with specific domain knowledge to look at this data visually and more importantly slice and dice the data to discover actionable insight.
Event Processing
For many years, TIBCO has been focused on the event processing company technologies that allows TIBCO customers to take knowledge gleaned from the past to react to changing conditions in the business in real-time. Even more, TIBCO gives its customers the ability to anticipate what will happen next and get a jump on the future.
Langdon pointed out that only with a complete understanding of customer data can an organization anticipate where an offer for a failed transaction can be converted into a sale or when a customer is physically near a retailer. He gave several examples of how events allow the understanding of data by putting in a context that can allow for smart, fast reaction.
To follow the conversation happening at transform2013 Paris, watch for us on Twitter at #Transform2013.
