Making decisions in a timely manner is always crucial to the success of organizations adapting to market changes. The ability to process large volumes of data from many sources is especially important to large enterprises. Living in Cincinnati, the home of Procter and Gamble (P&G), I heard that the company has been utilizing an interesting environment called Business Sphere, that enables them to respond to the marketplace by leveraging analytic models powered by Tibco Spotfire. As a result, I decided to attend TUCON, Tibco’s annual conference in Las Vegas to learn more about their strategy.

The conference strapline was “Everything is Different”, leading attendees to understand the rapid changes occurring in businesses. Tibco demonstrated a 2 second advantage of an event-enabled enterprise built on the Spotfire platform. With the deluge of information coming from various sources, this seemed a good way to communicate concisely the company’s value to attendees.

The integration theme was reiterated in the Expo Hall which was dominated by other building blocks of the Tibco platform: social, analytics, cloud, automation and event processing, all of which built on Tibco’s core strength: integration. There are examples of technology companies who diverged into market adjacencies and found themselves losing market share on their core strengths, while at the same time not being able to compete on the new products in their portfolio.
Tibco statistics were present all over the walls of the Aria conference center. Anecdotes of concurrent events “while you were asleep” included:

1. 294 billion emails sent
2. 35 million apps downloaded
3. more iPhones bought than babies born
4. 250 million photos uploaded to Facebook
5. 2 million blog posts written information consumed on the internet would fill 168 millions DVDs

These interesting facts made the challenge real to attendees and focused attention toward the need to develop solutions using integration technology to consume the data deluge.

Dashboards are a good way to view organizational data from multiple sources on one screen. This past weekend I saw an interesting real-life example of a dashboard in my family room (picture is above). A professional football fan could choose to watch a channel with one game or all the games on one channel on the NFL Network.

While not seeing each complete game, the screen displays the most relevant details of every game on one screen. While I do not know which technology company is behind the NFL example, this real world example suggests how Spotfire and other analytical dashboard products could provide incredible value in integrating information from multiple sources into one destination – enabling executives to make more timely decisions.

Tibco also demonstrated its social platform tibbr at TUCON and announced partnerships with Box, Badgeville, Wayin and Teamly (among others) at the conference. They also announced the release of the Enterprise Social Graph API, a toolset that gives developers an opportunity to integrate activities into their applications. In conjunction with the API, partners joining Tibco will provide additional value to customers using tibbr in the enterprise.

Tibco strategy offers a variety of interesting products supporting multiple domains that are applicable to a variety of enterprises. They made their strategy to offer a seamless experience to their customers very clear at the conference. And while Tibco has a very loyal customer set, the company needs to grow into fresh markets with their integrated solutions.