By Jim Sinur
(Aragon Research) – This year, TIBCO split its well-attended TIBCO NOW conference into three regional conferences: Singapore, Berlin, and San Diego. I attended the U.S. conference in San Diego.
The focus was on the progress of TIBCO’S vision for digital journeys. This blog explores how TIBCO is executing this vision when it comes to integration, business intelligence, and customer journeys.
Integration and Business Intelligence Reach New Levels
TIBCO has traditionally had a strong portfolio of visionary products and holds a sweet spot in connections, integrations, and business intelligence. While these themes were still strong at this year’s conference, new ones had emerged.
TIBCO’S integration (interconnect everything) and business intelligence (augment intelligence) have new scopes and levels of intelligence. The most impressive case studies were around business intelligence, such as Jet Blue and the Mercedes Racing Team. There were also some case studies around Cloud conversions, which are still in progress. The theme of disturbed intelligence (smarts on the edge) was new to me. Discussions around customer journeys leveraging a more intelligent customer experience was also boiling under the surface.
TIBCO’S management team believes that digital will change things. In fact, the management team pointed to survey-based conclusions to stay data-driven; without digital, revenue, profit, and stock value all displayed gaps.
Edge Presence, Intelligence, and TIBCO’s Partnerships
With an augmented approach to leveraging Flogo, TIBCO will be leveraging its intelligence even at the chip level. Another point of interest was the case for complexity of connections requiring decisions at the point of event detection. To that end, TIBCO has proof points of having Statistica (connected data science platform) and Google Tensor Flow (AI) operating at the lowest capacity chip level with a tiny footprint.
Intelligence at the edge is for real; now, case studies need to emerge leveraging the TIBCO approach. Partnerships with Amazon and leveraging Lamda looks a sure thing. As TIBCO starts working with Microsoft, watch for more options.
Skunk Work Teases
TIBCO hinted at some promising emerging technologies in its presentations and demos. In its graph database, I saw a Natural Language Processing approach to leveraging the nodes on the ontological-based database for intelligence—it remembers context as the query turns its attention to new things.
There were also whisperings of partnerships with big players leveraging distributed smarts.
Bottom Line
TIBCO sees the opportunity with digital and will make the right investments to help existing clients while attracting new ones, leading with its strengths in integration and intelligence.