Whether you are a diehard fan of either team, a casual observer–or someone who would rather talk about the UEFA cup or test cricket–this demo should hold your interest in its use of Business Intelligence to deliver a real-world solution. There is no halftime show, no wardrobe malfunctions, no sock puppets, and no cavemen–just something fun that you can share with your colleagues.

Check it out! http://spotfire.tibco.com/testdrive/

First of all, let me offer warmest holiday greetings to all of our friends around the world. This is a time of the year when we can assess what we’ve done well with our business over the past 12 months, what we could improve upon, and how we can go roaring into 2008 with a full head of steam.

That said, I realize that some of you may still be struggling with some last-minute shopping panic.

So I’d like to offer you a link to a very creative–and helpful, I think–little animation and tool that will guide you to gifts of many types in a wide range of prices.

This tool is meant to be fun, but it also offers an excellent demonstration of some of the capabilities of the Spotfire technology that TIBCO acquired in 2007. (Yes, I have to keep selling even during the holidays! But check it out, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.)

http://spotfire.tibco.com/holidays/

Best Wishes for the New Year!

TIBCO’s CEO and Chairman Vivek Ranadivé got straight to the heart of the matter in a recent interview, when he spoke about the necessity for a real-time “nervous system” at the center of enterprise IT. As Vivek explains further, you start to add muscles to this system with Business Process Management (BPM) as you develop your new, flexible SOA and get up to real-time, even predictive, speed in whatever competitive market you find yourself in.

ESB serves as the digital nervous system that Vivek outlines. And now it looks like the ESB approach is gaining traction beyond its well-established high-end base.

As Joe McKendrick recently put it, “ESBs have typically had more in common with limousines than mass-transit vehicles, (but now) are increasingly moving into the mid-market space.” Joe, in turn, based his observation on a recent Information Week article by Andy Dornan, which identifies ESB as one of four key SOA technologies (the others being governance, runtime management, and security gateways) in the author’s look at the future of SOA.

It’s easy enough to find innumerable abstruse debates about ESB: what it is, what it does, what it should do, whether it’s a gateway or part-and-parcel of SOAs, etc. I find these debates to be interesting and generally useful, but not very productive unless they focus on the key reasons to place the ESB in the center of enterprise IT: getting your company off its addiction to a database-oriented architecture (DOA), and liberating your processes and services into an architecture that is efficient, flexible, and can function in at least real-time.

I also agree with Joe–ESB is a mass-transit vehicle for mid-size companies as well as the Global 1000. Flexibility and agility should be available to anyone who needs it. With TIBCO, they are. Our continued leadership in developing ESB as a key enabler in the fast-growing world of SOAs encompasses a “big tent” approach in helping you move from DOA to SOA.

Let me explain why I think this is a significant distinction.

Cultivating an integrated, indigenous workforce is an imperative for economic success in any developing society. When TIBCO expands into a new market, we work hard to build a local team, provide the necessary training and skills set development, and, in general, participate and contribute as a good citizen of each and every country in which we operate.

So in South Africa, we’re following the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) program. Created to redress inequalities by giving disadvantaged groups economic opportunities previously not available to them, the BEE program includes measures such as employment equity, skills development, ownership, management and corporate social investment. In support of this, TIBCO has expanded our Software Skills Academy to South Africa, where we maintain offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban.
Beginning with basic training in our South African offices, academy enrollees then continue with a phase of higher-level training during a three-month stay at TIBCO’s R&D facility in the United Kingdom.

Recently, I had an opportunity to speak with one of our South African Software Skills Academy graduates, a woman named Rasia Mahomed, about her experience. After obtaining a degree in Human Resources, Rasia worked at the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) during an internship. With very limited exposure to IT and an educational background in HR, Rasia jumped into the TIBCO Software Skills Academy training program head first. She completed all the practical and theoretical coursework on TIBCO’s products and solutions quickly, graduating in just three months’ time. Today, she works closely with TIBCO engineers, serving customers throughout South Africa.

At TIBCO, we believe grassroots efforts such as the Software Skills Academy help to distinguish the company by engendering a longer term positive impact than the norm on the emerging markets in which we’re involved. TIBCO is not as large as your typical multi-national organization in terms of revenue or number of employees just yet. But we are determined to be a global leader in making a difference. When it comes to corporate social responsibility, we believe it’s never too early to act.

(1) feverishly paced work on the go-to-market plans for our next series of SOA products, slated for launch later this year;
(2) TUCON, TIBCO’s User Conference held earlier this summer (a huge success, by the way); and
(3) a demanding 6-year old at home on summer break, which can often collide with your daily schedule. Now I’m able to come up for air and share some exciting news with you.

This news, of course, is “about IT-everyman” – known quite simply as “Greg the Architect.” The concept behind Greg the Architect began as a fun, interesting experiment to try and capture the frustration the average Joe or Jane in IT experiences every day when it comes to SOA. We obviously struck a chord because the response has been tremendous, reverberating across the blogosphere and traditional media. Here’s the most recent installment in the series:

At the 2007 Stevie Awards, Greg the Architect won a Stevie, beating out more sophisticated multi-million dollar creations from folks like Wyndham Hotels. What a pleasant, unexpected surprise for my marketing team to receive public accolades for a “fun at work” creative side project. Greg has strong opinions on the technology landscape. Lookout for Greg on the web, even at you next IT conference…

The problem?
I am a traditional BI user. I am continually confronted with the eternal cycle of having to provide requirements for all my analytic needs in advance. Then we go through the inevitable discovery meetings and project meetings, with IT, fine-tuning the reports. As always in business, things change–parameters change, data changes. Guess what…(sigh!)…we are back to the drawing board, and I can hope to get another set of canned reports in 3 or 6 months.

What we wanted to do
We’ve always believed that this was not the right way to go about this business. People need a way to ask questions and change their parameters on the fly as requirements change. All of you Excel Power users know exactly what I mean. Remember how long it takes to master those macros!

I needed something I could use within 30 minutes of my introduction to the software, and something that could do ad hoc queries. I needed something that visualizes the answers I seek, but that would also enable me to play with “what if’” parameters to provide insights. Most important, if we were able to connect the analytics tool to TIBCO’s real-time infrastructure–and folks had access in real time to events and processes as they happened–we would truly have a new way of looking at and analyzing information.  

Why Spotfire?
We spent a lot of time this last year analyzing and looking at Next-Gen BI companies. When Mike Magaro, our VP of Corporate Development, appeared one morning in February and suggested I look at the Spotfire demo, I knew this was it. Now a few months later, we are poised to deliver on the vision I outlined earlier. This is enterprise-class software that goes far beyond any sort of toy office suite sitting on your laptop or brittle BI application that takes a week in class to learn and a few months more to master.

As we went through the mechanics of the merger, we met a bunch of folks who really “got it,” a bunch of world-class customers using Spotfire for things as diverse as asset management, clinical trials analysis, and sales and marketing analytics. We also saw a bunch of smart people clocking 20% plus annual growth. Whether you are a development engineer, a product-line exec, or even a marketing guy, Spotfire’s approach will be appealing and intuitive. We believe we are now in a position to deliver a jolt to traditional analytic approaches and upset the status quo.

We plan on being very disruptive to our competitors, but very helpful to our users. More than 1000 TIBCO customers will learn first-hand this week about Spotfire when they attend TUCON in San Francisco. If you’ve made it to TUCON this year, then welcome! If you’re not in San Francisco this week, then go back to the our Spotfire page learn more about the announcement.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve built Spotfire to be the leading and most innovative (not so modest!) designer, developer, and supplier of software for finding interesting insights in data - based on an awesome user experience and modular application infrastructure.  Our use of in memory processing, interactive visualizations, ad hoc “free dimensional” queries, and visual workflow development are just a few of the things that help us deliver a radically faster experience that is far more adaptable to different business processes than traditional BI.  Our mission from the beginning has been to give customers an information advantage.  We’ve had the opportunity to work with fantastic customers across the world to make this happen.

Spotfire is at a very exciting point in time – a perfect time to join TIBCO.  I’ve talked in my blog about business intelligence 2.0 and what is driving the change in the market - user experience, speed, interactivity, relevance to business problems, etc. We’ve seen an incredible momentum in the market for this across nearly every type of business.

At the same time we’ve also seen how customers are looking for robust infrastructure as it relates to driving timely data to decisions. The traditional approach which results in a 2 year data warehouse project followed by mountains of static reports emailed out every week just doesn’t work anymore. So it makes a whole lot of sense for us to combine with the team at TIBCO - allowing us integrate our user experience and next-gen BI platform with absolutely the industry’s leading SOA infrastructure. 

Together TIBCO and Spotfire will be able to provide an unprecedented user experience coupled with an infrastructure that can drive data in real time to that user experience.  I believe this will disrupt the BI market as it stands. Think of portfolio managers, sales managers, or manufacturing managers – in fact, anyone! – who need to make critical decisions in a world drowning in data. Now they’ll be able to interact with that data in a real time interactive experience configured for their type of work (their “business process”)!  Who else can do that for you?! (not so modest again!)

I am very excited as you might read into the above text. We will have a lot of fun continuing to build the Spotfire brand and business as part of TIBCO. We will have great opportunities to increase our presence in the market, increase investments in R&D and product development, and of course, leverage the TIBCO product infrastructure to help you create an information advantage for your business.

Looking forward to seeing you in the market place!

TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé put it succinctly when he said: “Their brand has been devalued, their technology is largely obsolete, and most of their good people have already left.” (Read the Jason Stamper interview with Vivek.)

So, after press release sound bites–and some din about synergy, upsell and cross-sell, and complementary geographies–it’s time to look at the reality of this acquisition.

For starters, there are two ESB’s; two repositories, and two BPM strategies. webMethods has been suffering from an aggressive acquisition strategy of its own over the past several years. All this did was add a bunch of point products from smaller loss-making private startups into the mix. The resulting fragmented architecture is one of the key reasons the webMethods Fabric technology has failed to gain widespread adoption.

The merger only exacerbates the problem. It will create confusion and risk for existing customers of both companies. Meanwhile, management will have to cut costs to be accretive, or increase spending on R&D to integrate the stacks of a loss-making business! Is this a Hobson’s choice or what?

We all know that infrastructure customers are among the most sophisticated, value-focused IT buyers. They look way beyond the hype for real products, and will keep their options open. The market moves very fast, is unforgiving, and seeks solutions NOW.

A year from now, what we may see is essentially a one-year-old software company with a foggy stack, hard to decipher direction; Sun/Seebeyond-renamed Sun Java CAPS- déjà vu anyone? We are delighted with the deal and wish Software AG and Web methods well; they certainly got their work cut out for them.

This story was picked up by an intrepid reporter in HK who found the video at YouTube. We really have entered the age of 21st century “fortuitously intentional” marketing. What do I mean by that? We intentionally posted the video on YouTube, and halfway across the globe someone fortuitously thought it worthy of a story. I think this is a more powerful way to express the idea of what is widely known as viral marketing. After all, watch the Greg videos, there’s nothing virulent about Greg!

We focused on ROI in the second installment of “GTA,” as Greg is fondly known around here, because no matter how detailed and specific the IT benefits related to SOA truly are, there will be no SOA without ROI. The executive level must execute its fiduciary responsibility and demand this. Globally. So now that Greg has traveled to Hong Kong, one wonders where he will go next? Stay tuned!

There have been gaps in the industry, and in our strategy as well. One of the big gaps for practitioners and developers–Testing! Commercial web testing tools have been difficult to use for Ajax applications. And support for Enterprise-grade QA environments has been a big gap for Industry Ajax frameworks.

In our case, we’ve had customers such as Fedex peppering us very recently with questions about testing Ajax-based interfaces.With last weeks’ announcement, we are bringing the first OS Ajax testing tool to the market; we hope to answer that questions from our customers and the Ajax community.

GITAK will be available under an Apache 2.0 Open Source license. GITAK is a set of extensions to the popular Selenium QA tools, and is now available as a no-cost download from developer.tibco.com.