05.12.10
Tibco’s Hits and Misses
Messaging is Tibco’s business, but it has had a mixed track record when it comes to making the messaging around its message-oriented view of the world. It starts off on the right foot. Its perennial tagline, The Power of Now, has become timelier in a world where the ability to respond is reinforced by the headlines. Just take last couple weeks for example: last Thursday’s weird Wall Street meltdown, and before that, arrest of the foiled bomber of Times Square.
Tibco is hardly alone in voicing such messaging. IBM’s Smarter Planet and Progress Software’s Operational Responsiveness are also about the need for systems that think on their feet. Yet Tibco’s DNA gives it a unique claim to this space as the company was born around fast reliable, messaging. Two years ago, Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadive made the case for event-driven predictive intelligence. Now Tibco is talking about the need, in global marketing head Ram Menon’s words, “to humanize the story better.” That’s always been a stretch for this technology-driven company whose vision has long been driven by a shy, technology centric CEO. Towards that goal, Tibco is taking a step or two forward, but unfortunately also a step back.
The good news is that Tibco is fleshing out it’s “Power of Now” tagline. We saw the first of a new series of simple, straightforward visual ads with short statements of business outcomes, like how Tibco’s event processing helps defense agencies clear the fog of war, underscored by the tagline.
Then Tibco unveiled a new tag line, the Two-Second Advantage, which makes the case if that you have just enough information quickly enough, you don’t need the complete picture to make the right decision. Tibco’s on a roll there, a message backed up by the surprisingly irreverent Ronald K. Noble, the brash New Yorker who heads Interpol, who made the case that such an advantage can have life or death implications in crime fighting, especially when it comes to border control.
The problem is that just when you’ve thought that Tibco finally has gotten on message, it reverts back to its geeky self and steps on top of it. The latest case is its CEO’s Enterprise 3.0 concept that, when debuted in front of a room of analysts, floated like a lead balloon.
His numbering is over simplistic and cuts against popular perception: Ranadive terms Enterprise 2.0 as client/server, rather than the social computing weave that is now seeping into enterprise systems – including Tibco’s. But bloggers of record Sandy Kemsley and Brenda Michelson summed it up best. Kemsley: “Enterprise 3.0 is becoming a joke amongst the analysts attending here today (we’re tweeting about staging an intervention)…” Michelson:” We like the 2 second advantage message, but “Enterprise 3.0” doesn’t resonate, it won’t be meaningful to Business Execs and CIOs.”
Tibco doesn’t need new messaging, it just has to bring out the best of what it already has. It can humanize “The Power of Now” by appending the question, “What does it really mean?” And from that, “The two-second advantage,” and all the business cases that manifest it, become the logical response.
‘Nuff said.
With acquisitions and organic product development, Tibco’s portfolio is broader than ever, and not surprisingly, this year’s event carried announcements of a large number of product upgrades and introductions. For us the highlight was ActiveMatrix BPM, which finally puts Tibco’s business process management engine on the same Eclipse development platform and runtime as the rest of Tibco’s service orchestration products. As a completely new product (this is not iProcess, which becomes Tibco’s legacy BPM offering rooted from the original Staffware acquisition). This is a major development for a vendor that has accumulated a large portfolio of individual products over the years, with the harshest critique being the need for multiple runtime engines: ActiveMatrix, iProcess, BusinessWorks, Rendezvous, EMS, etc. The new BPM offering fills a critical gap in the SOA-oriented ActiveMatrix product family.
Our critique here – as with IBM – is that the use of Eclipse as the design time platform appeals more to developers than business stakeholders. But the fact that ActiveMatrix BPM is intended to be an execution platform means that so-called nirvana of having business people design their own business processes is the type of stuff that you do when in a room with a whiteboard. Fortuitously, Tibco does have something in the works, as it previewed Design Collaborator, a new process definition tool that suspiciously resembled IBM BPM Blueprint; we hope that Tibco designs it so that it could feed BPMN models into ActiveMatrix BPM so it doesn’t become a dead-end product.
There were other introductions, such as the none-too original, retro-named PeopleForms (which sounds like the name for one of Oracle’s legacy PeopleSoft offerings) that for now only churns out SharePoint-like forms-driven apps as a beta. PeopleForms addresses a low end of the market not served by Tibco, developed by what’s left of the old General Interface team; eventually this will be beefed up into something more useful with workflow. We also hope that there might be some rationalization with Design Collaborator, so that this product doesn’t wind up becoming a standalone curiosity.
But the most profound impression came from an acquisition that Tibco completed only in March. Our award for best-of-the-day award from the analyst sessions was demonstration of Netrics, a tiny 15-person outfit out of Princeton, NJ that has developed a patented, algorithmic pattern matching program that really fleshes out the “two-second advantage message’ in providing proximate matches that should be “good enough: to make decisions. Netrics’ technology assigns algorithms as metadata that scores the identity of names or people or things; using that metadata, it quickly reduces large data sets to find probable matches. Those probable matches can be filtered to include or exclude misspellings and typos. Netrics’ technology has ready applicability to identifying event patterns and golden copies of data – and as such, Tibco’s initial plans are to incorporate the technology into Tibco Business Events (their CEP offering) and Master Data Management. On the horizon, it provides a pattern matching approach that complements text mining that is often used in national security applications.
Netrics is not a replacement for data quality – that remains a major gap ion Tibco’s product suite. While the two-second advantage implies having data that is “good enough,” when you perform event processing and must make snap decisions. But over the long haul, you’ll need the kind of feedback loop and reality check on those decisions that business intelligence provides – and for that, you’ll need data that is better scrubbed.