TIBCO Transform - it says it all

I attended TIBCO's Transform event in London.
Located at the Westminster Bridge Park Plaza hotel, around 600 people were there. Kicked off by Raj Verma, Senior VP of worldwide Marketing, a 2 hour session started that never bored for a minute. Very smoothly Raj led us through a full history of TIBCO, showing impressive figures like a 21% CAGR over the last 15 years, reaching almost a billion dollars in revenue with currently 3,000 employees

Having spent $130 million in R&D last year, the total R&D sum over the years accounted to $1 billion - a huge amount that proves how serious TIBCO is about innovation and fulfilling their goal of "making this world a better place"

Next up was Matt Quinn, CTO, who took the audience into the future.
My takeaways: Tibco Faster Than Light processes 1 million messages per second - that's 60 times Twitter's highest peak so far, and Tibco Silver Mobile lays the foundation for native mobile apps with HTML5 on top. A perfect hybrid model like I described earlier this month.
The really thrilling news was that TIBCO has decided to make most of their products available for evaluation and trial, for just everyone out there.
They'll announce that at TUCON as well so the spoiler alert has come too late in my case, sorry.
Raj ended the morning session by showing 2 videos that were exemplary of how real-time analysis, combined with personal data gathering, could turn a lousy night into an agreeable one for both parties - providing a win-win perspective for a lose-lose perception, by rewarding loyal customers with the proper discounts at the right time

After the lunch break the afternoon break-outs started.
I picked the Nimbus session first which was not nearly as interesting as I had hoped for. I had read about the take-over in August 2011 and was anxious to hear about the synergy now, but got fed technical details in stead about the improvements to Nimbus itself.
Luckily I was sitting next to some people who were quite knowledgeable about it all and told me that Nimbus is a business suite really, rather than IT. It's aimed at discovering, describing and improving business processes and as such I think it is a great addition to TIBCO, forming the much needed human layer in between existing processes and systems, and their optimisation and automation - not from within Nimbus itself, although I suspect that might be added at some point.
With a great big stress on "might". As little as I knew about Nimbus, I see a very strong way into the current TIBCO offering

The session after that was on LogLogic, bought in April this year. A very good presentation that painlessly described how logs from hundreds of different systems and applications are pulled, analysed and combined.
Needless to say this is a smart design as it's absolutely non-intrusive: log files are abundant and pretty default as per product version. Yes the diversity is great but they live at the infrastructure level, so not as great as one would fear. Combine LogLogic with data analysis tools such as Spotfire and centralised real-time monitoring and alerting is a fact - the Enterprise dashboard for Operations is here

Last but not least: Complex Event Processing. A highly interesting session on events that gave me a few pointers for this decade with regard to SaaS, customisation and requirements - to be followed upon at the end of this post. In a word, real-time event analysis will bring you the 2-second advantage Vivek holds so highly: it's better to have just a few bits of useful information right on time, than all the information in the world weeks or even months later.
Andreas Bauer presented the picture above. Although it was in a confidential and TIBCO proprietary presentation, I'm sure they won't mind. We all know the spaghetti theme and have seen it many more times than we wanted...

I had to leave early to catch my flight, and this is definitely the last time that I'm flying the EasyJet schedule. Not because I didn't like the service, on the contrary - but the latest flight leaves London at 7 which means it's 4:30 PM at the very latest that you have to abandon an event. I could stay the night but that would mean getting up at 4 the next day and making it into the office after 10. Possible, but not attractive.
Hence, next time I'll be flying KLM again, so I can finish the day with the usual drinks and oh so valuable get togethers

I am delighted to see that TIBCO has been buying top and bottom products that really add value to their core. With LogLogic it adds a data layer to the bottom, bringing centralised non-intrusive monitoring to the Enterprise. Nimbus adds a layer on top, enabling people to discover, chart and analyse business processes which can then be automated if need be. Complex event Processing, and analytics driven by Spotfire, give you tremendous decision-making information which enable you to surgically operate your Enterprise. The real-life examples shown were really awesome

The trends I see are threefold:

• First, we're moving down the stack and start integrating on the data layer again
• Second, operating on events opens up a whole new world of how to deal with the never-ceasing demand of customisation - more on that in the next post
• Third, I see Portals at the horizon. Not chiselling screens into and out of others like we did ten years ago, but neatly portable web-based ones

TIBCO has made interesting decisions for the near future. I won't forget to mention tibbr of course but have blogged enough on that for now, although I'm anxious to see what's in store for tibbr 4.0. I would have loved to attend the in-memory session as well as the strategy sessions on MDM, messaging, SOA and most certainly BPM

Thank you TIBCO for a very interesting and smooth event - until next time. Meanwhile, I'll catch up on what I missed