Follow Datanami:
October 31, 2011

TIBCO CEO Outlines Enterprise 3.0 Approach

Datanami Staff

There are countless companies that have boasted outstanding earnings this year but have managed to fly under the radar. One such technology firm is Palo Alto-based maker of middleware and analytics software, TIBCO.

TIBCO’s CEO, Vivek Ranadive appeared on the popular investment television show, Mad Money, recently, as a prime example of an undervalued technology company. Ranadive made a rapid-fire and rather solid case for the need for real-time analytics across the enterprise, making a few jabs at competitors Oracle and IBM along the way.

Ranadive began by putting his company’s software in practical context, pointing to a number of large-scale use cases involving their software, including their work with India’s largest private sector company, Reliance Industries.

He says that as a telco with 70 million customers, Reliance is still growing, adding around 5 million customers each month. The problem, however, is that while they are making swift gains, the company was losing a million and a half customers each month by using what X calls, “twentieth century technologies from Oracle and others” to analyze data after the fact—or after the moment to make use of actionable intelligence to retain customers had passed.

According to Ranadive, instead of those “outdated” technologies, TIBCO works to pick up every signal, using complex event processing to deliver near real-time intelligence to avoid customer loss. This is the core of their “Enterprise 3.0” strategy, which is focused on delivering real-time information to allow for on-the-spot decision making. This has found some broad appeal in financial services and retail sectors in particular.

In other interviews, Ranadive has stated that the goals of TIBCO are to allow for the management and processing of events at the hyperscale, to create platforms that allow for the development and management of applications universally and to emphasize the integration and consolidation of an enterprise’s existing tools, environments and investments.

Mad Money’s Cramer asked Ranadive a great question during the interview, inquiring about why it seems that enterprises seem to have the most powerful analytics and real-time processing capabilities while the U.S. government flounders with its strategy. Ranadive said that one of the problems with the government approach to analytics is that they work in batch whereas TIBCO works in real time. This could be one of the reasons why government intelligence agencies selected the software maker to power their cybersecurity efforts that aim to process threat information on the spot.

As an additional bit of news on the TIBCO front, Gartner waved their magic wands and positioned them as a leader in the SOA Governance magic quadrant today.

Datanami