
TIBCO CTO Matt Quinn launched the technology keynote at this year’s TUCON, TIBCO’s user conference, with the three big bets we are making: We’re putting a stake in the ground with integration, Big Data and cloud. Where better than Las Vegas to be talking about big bets?
To put those bets into context, TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé and COO Murray Rode talked about what’s happening in 2013. The combination of technology trends (cloud, social, mobile, and Big Data) are changing the expectations of consumers, customers, and employees. It is influencing the way they live, enabling them to be far more innovative.
Potentially, this explosion of technology options means that life can seem extremely complex and confusing. The challenge for technology providers is to hide complexity and make customer experience and employee experience simple, elegant, and beautiful—no matter what the device.
To do this, TIBCO is making huge investments to make sure that the TIBCO Platform allows clients to more quickly and easily build solutions that excite their customers and employees. TIBCO does this through the Platform’s five pillars: automation, events, analytics, cloud, social. Within each of the pillars are discrete products that are loosely coupled yet seamlessly integrated, meaning they can be used independently or delivered together.
Quinn talked about the focus of investment…the big bets:
- Integration: TIBCO made its name as a pioneer in integration and has been constantly investing and innovating in this area for more than 20 years. So why the renewed focus? Firstly, it is foundational. But there are now significantly more application types that need to be integrated—cloud (of SaaS) apps, social media apps, packaged solutions and mobile devices. An example of this is the launch of Cloud Bus.
- Big Data: Big Data is just hype until it has been operationalized and gets put to work. Big Data, combined with events, gives critical context. But there are lots of different types of data—machine, mobile, people-generated, and transactional data—which is then split into data in motion and data at rest. The challenge is taking this huge volume of data in different formats, identifying the events that are critical, and driving out important insights. The ultimate goal is to not only be able to understand the past, but, more importantly, anticipate the future. At the heart of TIBCO’s Big Data capability is Spotfire.
- Cloud: The investment in cloud is on many fronts. It is clear that the cloud is inevitable for most companies with increased reliance on SaaS applications, but on-premise applications are not going away. This means that the hybrid cloud is now part of the IT landscape that increases integration complexity, hence the investment focus on integration. But clients also want to be able to use many of the TIBCO products on a cloud platform. Therefore, a focus of the investment has been enabling many of the TIBCO products to run on Silver Mobile—TIBCO’s mobile platform. Finally, CIOs are building mobile apps for internal use and customer-facing apps. The wide range of target devices makes cross-platform development tools and environment essential if apps are going to be delivered cost effectively.
The investments in the TIBCO Platform will enable clients to transform themselves, building beautiful, elegant applications that have unparalleled customer experience. TIBCO’s big bets seem far less risky than other bets you could make in Las Vegas. In fact, they’re a sure bet in today’s technology world.