TIBCO invited media and analysts to a briefing with its US-based, CEO, Murray Rode and Erich Gerber, General Manager of Asia Pacific and Japan, to update them on its market and products. Additionally ASX’s CIO Tim Thurman gave an enthusiastic overview of its involvement with TIBCO.
It was my first exposure to Palo Alto based TIBCO, so please take this article as a primer for enterprises that may have need of its reasonably unique integration, analytics, and events processing software.
It all began in 1985 out of a technology incubator producing the Teknekron Information Bus (TIB) to transfer data between different software systems, computers, and operating systems. It was pretty revolutionary in those days to be able to link disparate software systems, mainframes, and desktops. It got its first huge break integrating market data such as stock quotes, news, and other financial information and eventually digitised Wall Street.
TIBCO (the information bus company) was floated in 1997 and counted SAP, IBM, Oracle, Yahoo, and Microsoft among its customers. Most of the world’s 25 top airlines use it. It allows them to merge and use data from all over and push it to the web via a browser. Fast forward to the end of 2014 when it was acquired by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners and Murray Rode became CEO. The rest of the article is paraphrased.
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Many major Australian enterprise companies in finance, superannuation, telco, utilities, mining, government, and the Australian Stock Exchange use TIBCO. Gerber announced the company’s intention to invest further in Australia.
Its value proposition is to take businesses to their digital destinations by interconnecting everything in real time and providing augmented intelligence for everyone, from business users to data scientists. This combination delivers faster answers, better decisions, and smarter actions.
Data has become crucial to leverage to establish competitive differentiation. Cloud computing has become yet another platform there in an increasing demand within companies to interconnect and integrate everything to unlock hidden data value.
Customer service and business processes are based on real-time coordination of people, devices, and data that are not necessarily owned by the enterprise. In today’s data-driven world, organizations need to connect their assets with their customers and their ecosystem more than ever. Its “bus” is now more a blend of API (application program interface) management and BPM (business process management) all in real-time.
TIBCO’s bus is now called its Fast Data Platform and it allows it to interrogate the data as well allowing the enterprise to unlock relationships and dependencies that they did not know existed. Its analytics suit helps grow customer bases, provide new services, make contextual offers, and extends to data security.
Rode sees a large part of the future in integrating data from IoT and its ability to recognise patterns “in-flight” by using more machine learning and augmented intelligence. It is ideal to provide this at the “edge” where the majority of IoT innovation needs to be done to reduce the flood of data that could be sent back to servers.
Thurber said the ASX was an aficionado. He said the ASX scope made it one of the largest of its type in the world and of its journey over the past few years to eliminate separate silos and knock out several legacy systems. “Very few exchanges do what we do.”
He said TICO had made it easy to standardise hundreds of APIs, and enable the ASX to start to use the data and monetise it. “ASX has a mountain of disparate data, but it was hard to do much with it. When you look at a technical document of our platform, it is like a spider web of data just going everywhere. Our goal is to standardise that so we can house that data, and eventually take it from one point." Its aim is to use TIBCO to build a data strategy and be more proactive and predictive.
ASX uses the TIBCO Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to provide the interface between each of its core business services. The API-based architecture allows ASX to streamline data flows without having to alter its underlying systems. "Many of our existing systems are proprietary, and data is not handled in a standard way. ESB provides us with a robust solution on which systems can communicate much more efficiently.
He said that the ASX, like many enterprises, had lots of older, legacy hardware and software. "Part of the challenge is we have a lot of platforms that are very old and very stable, but part of the problem is it doesn't allow you to innovate quickly enough. Over the next 3-5 years it would need to be replaced and TIBCO is key to that.”
ASX has some projects underway, and the majority of those involve integration with the TIBCO ESB platform. "Already, several core services are linked to the bus, and it has become the backbone of our entire IT infrastructure. It underpins our core operations and ensures we can provide first-class customer service. Our technology transformation strategy continues, and we look forward to working with TIBCO throughout this process."