Tibco tools up for CEM

A fascinating development – or perhaps that should read lack of a development – was to be seen at the recent Tibco Transform conference held in London. The company is one of the big names in integration technology, to which it has added a range of in-house developments and company acquisitions that has given it the depth of coverage that allows it to say provides real Customer Experience Management (CEM) capabilities. Yet it declines in public to go that far.

Instead, Matt Langdon, the company’s senior Vice President of Strategic Operations and Chief Marketing Officer, talked about how the company is combining integration with Big Data analytics, coupling it with social media tools and a range of other developments that can give users a comprehensive handle on delivering services to customers, and measuring their response.

That is the essence of CEM, which in the end analysis is the making or breaking of most brands, and consequently most businesses. It often seems to be an accepted truth that spending millions on advertising and PR is the way to build a brand. But in the end it is about delivering the service that customers want, and will want to come back for.

Tibco is now pretty much in a position to deliver that capability to businesses. This does mark something of a watershed for the company, however, and is perhaps a reason for its reluctance to claim the CEM role explicitly. As an established big systems integration business its reputation is heavily geared to its ability to develop and deploy technology that  builds out on and exploits that core integration piece.

It is also keen to ensure that any gaps in the growing product and service portfolio that fills out the provision of CEM capabilities are plugged. This means the company is still on the acquisition trail, with companies such as StreamBase Systems (real time event processing and analytics), Maporama Solutions (geographic information combined with business intelligence), Log Logic (scalable log and security intelligence platform), and Nimbus Partners (business process discovery and analysis applications) being among the most recent.

This raises an important question of balance, for both Tibco as a vendor and businesses as potential customers. It is the nature of the cloud, and the integration capabilities that Tibco can offer, that users can build comprehensive services through the collaboration of loosely coupled applications and tools. But the cloud also means that businesses can build unique services that precisely meet their requirements. This is certainly going to be the case when it comes to what any business seeks with a CEM environment.

Partnership is, therefore, arguably a better option than acquisition from the users’ point of view. Now Tibco is certainly not against partnerships, but its apparent keenness on acquisitions could lead to the point where its offerings start to veer towards being proscriptive rather than prescriptive.  

That being said, the company does now offer one of the most comprehensive ranges of CEM components, and with its integration capabilities it is in a position to offer one of the richest collaboration platforms on which users can build the CEM solutions they require, and allow the users to add, delete and modify those solutions as often as they need.

As Chief Technology Officer, Matt Quinn, pointed out at the conference, the world of the cloud is radically different from the traditions of on-premise IT. “For, example,” he observed, “it is now quite common for applications in the cloud to have a useful life of just six or seven weeks.”

That can be a specific service of collaborating applications built by a business for a specific project, or it can be a SaaS-delivered solution used for a short period. In tradition on-premise IT, applications lifecycles are still running at six or seven years, if not more.

For many business IT departments, bridging the gap between cloud services such as SaaS and on-premise applications is still one of the core issues. For many it is still seen as an `either-or’ transition. Quinn outlined Tibco’s solution to this, in the form of Cloud Bus.

This allows users to integrate on-premise applications and SaaS services together and then choose where and how to run them. If it is considered important, or safer, to run the created service on-premise as an effective private cloud that choice is available. If it is appropriate to run in the cloud as a hosted service, that choice is available. Perhaps more important however, is that neither choice is permanent.

Once brought together, the applications or service can be switched between the two environments without any further implementation engineering or optimisation being required. This means IT departments get the option to undertake service development in-house, run it on-premise to validate and test the service, then run it in production on-premise, or in the cloud, or move it between those resources depending on circumstances, such as fluctuating capacity demands.

Quinn also outlined how Tibco is moving on a number of different fronts to build out its CEM delivery capabilities. For example, its social media offering, Tibbr, continues to be enhanced in its capabilities for providing collaboration over a growing range of mobile devices.

Meanwhile, Version 5.5 of the company’s SpotFire analytics system has been enhanced to allow to be mashed with third party applications as well as integrated with Tibco’s own applications suite. This is a good example of the partnership approach, as it should allow users to create the analytics environment of its choosing.

Tibco is also moving in the direction of increasing automation that can enhance the capabilities and delivery of CEM. This is particularly the case with Business Events Extreme, a high-performance event processing platform that can monitor, analyse, and respond to parallel event streams in and across an enterprise. This is specifically targeting Complex Event Processing (CEP) and real-time event-driven applications, but increasingly, being able to monitor interaction events between a business and its customers, and then automatically make appropriate decisions and action them, in real-time.

At the other end of the CEM line, the LogLogic product group has introduced Iris. This provides application trouble-shooting and forensic capabilities for application developers, support engineers, security analysts and QA testers, and is valuable not only in the development process, but also to the `E’ part of CEM where it can help identify service delivery problems quickly. From application and machine log data it can intelligently process and visualise results that deliver self-service troubleshooting and forensics for applications problem resolution.